By Erica Jong
Date: 20 October 1999

Josh

  When Josh read my poems originally he'd thought, This sounds 
like someone I could talk to. It had flashed through his mind
that perhaps I was the woman for him, but he cast this out as
wishful thinking. There is intuition and extuition. Intuition is
the voice of one's spiritual counselors, and extuition is the
work of the evil eye. The evil eye told Josh: "She'd never be
interested in you." So he tucked the poems in some attic of his
brain and went on fucking his current girl friend, whose tits
he love but whose mind he couldn't seem to locate."I discovered
that you can't base a relationship on tits," he told me.
 But can you base one on poems? Or on a few days in bed at the
Beverly Hills Hotel? Or on having the same childhood experiences?
Or on both being born under the same sign of the zodiac? Who
knows?
 I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers
who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have
nothing to do with the rationalizations we give. Poems are the
greatest proof of this. Again and again I've noticed that my
poems predict my future, that I write a detailed poem about some
event in my life months before it occurs. This was the case with
some of the love poems I sent Josh. They referred to events that
would not happen until later. It was almost as if I wrote first
and then waited for my life to catch up. I, who was so indecisive
about almost everything else, was utterly convinced from the
moment I met Josh that this was the man who would make my life
whole. Even though our fucking was not quite perfected, even
though my friends considered it the sheerest madness for a
"successful" New York lady like me to join my life with a "hippie
kid" who was an unemployed screenwriter to boot, I knew it was
right. My poems knew it, at any rate.