"Hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe."
--Tom Stoppard

A bed, a telephone, the cord
to the world
beyond the womb . . .
Here lovers meet, have met,
will meet again behind different faces
while the icy picures
look on,
seeing nothing.

Hotel rooms see nothing.

Business transacted,
prostitutes killed,
marriages silently shaken;
what happens here
is off the record;
there is no record
when the sheets
are changed
every night
for other guests.

& you my darling
my lover, my reader,
ultimately
myself,
why are you hungering so,
why are you opening
abysses in yourself
before you rush off
to the next appointment?

Eternity is just
a hotel room--
deluxe or seedy
as the fates allow,
lonely as the loneliest
one-night stand,
& with no telephone.

Or is it the body?
Is the body the hotel room after all?
O let us inhabit it amply, crying
& screaming & embracing
before we

check out.

© Erica Mann Jong

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