She is frightened when the book is done.
The novel whose scrawled yellow pages
have filled her heart for seven years
is snatched away.
& the hole in her heart echoes
like a garbage can
thrown against a courtyard
in New York.

She writes to fill that hole
whose quicksand edges
eat her heart out from the muddy center,
& when they take away her pages,
her stuffing, her asbestos insulation,
she rattles
like a palsied hand
sticking out a silver spoon
for sugar.

The book-in-progress
was the mattress of a bed
where her past made love
to her future,
where her mother hugged her father,
where all the apparitions of the dead
slept like babies
after nighttime bottles.

She has no choice--she will begin again.
Her loneliness: the motor of her pen.

© Erica Mann Jong

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