Here are three fairly short poems from a fairly long series
in progress.
The name of the series is From Freud's Window.
And each section of the poem has a truncated epigraph
from The Interpretation of Dreams.
If anybody's read Jonathan Williams' wonderful book,
the Loco Logodaedalist in Situ, I
used his method of taking a little file card
and cutting out a window, which he
did for Havelock Ellis' text.
He did all of the poem that way.
I just got the epigraph from it.
At any rate, what I hope is that the truncated epigraph provides
something of the sense of distortion or a displacement
that Freud describes as characteristic
of dreams or dreamwork.
I should also say that in the first of the short poems,
there are a lot of strange Whitmanisms and quotations
from Whitman floating around, the strangest
I take it being the word promulge, which is Whitmanian,
a kind of bombastic version of to publish, advertise,
or announce, usually applied to oneself.
From Freud's Window, one.
The epigraph.
The work of a censorship, which no longer takes the trouble
to conceal its operation.
Gaps are the beginning.
It lurches on in splotches, riddling holes with blotched,
receding light.
Nature wasn't the only thing which wanted to abhor a vacuum,
stamping its petulant feet in tiny cacophonies,
a gilded Pavlova.
What remained got antsy when discussed could scarcely
be addressed.
They practiced magic tricks with your most highly prized
possessions.
Doctor, I would like, if possible,
to arrange my removal from all these spaces.
The cough was polite, but you weren't the one who vanished.
From the mid, the easily written,
loose-fingered fakes and chords, you learn to love the remnants.
Ragtag, gaudy, and bedecked in intense availability,
like women in dreams, for a while.
Imagining oneself as one of the toy soldiers
was discouraged, and rightly so.
So we promulged, correctly lurking
in corners in a prescribed fashion,
under a thunder which no longer necessarily presaged relief.
It will be summer here for a long time,
one feels, the white knights of the city dazzling the mind
and haunting it into the new lesson, repeated until everyone
grows glassy-eyed.
One gazes at the moon, forgetting his name
in the new dispensation, as someone senses slowly moving
through the mouth lost words which have made you disappear.
Two.
And the epigraph this time from the interpretation of dreams
is the right-- and this is very truncated--
the right to be treated in my dream
as a reincarnation of the prehistoric old nurse.
So she glowered at everyone, wrinkling her eyeballs
in terrific frenzy.
Pretty scary, huh?
The landscape turns into a house with too many corners
and closets.
A stairway which led to trouble in deeper recesses.
Sometimes we didn't want to live there.
The child always crying, let's move.
Let's move.
The picture trapped you.
The friendly pink house rendered sinister
by its huge paintbrush, the gate which projected forward
from the picture plane, commenting ceaselessly
on life and art.
The sky receded above like a corridor.
You won't get out by going further in, they said.
And you won't get out by getting out.
They wreathed you in their shifting smiles
like moons reflecting in a sea of something which
wasn't like water or shadows within a complicity gesturing
in blinks of the otherwise constant light toward extending
pickets which seemed about to lead
beyond the enclosing flatness.
They knew about art as they knew about your life,
one learned, discovering the lesson which
lurked there, a vague, archaic dragon
at the edges of the pretty, always smaller yard.
And would tell you each time you thought you had strayed there
only too gladly what they knew.
I forgot to say that's based on a painting by Max Ernst.
And a final section also with an epigraph from Freud,
hence at the same time as five others
and had therefore been her father's favorite.
That was one view of it.
Configurations twine through fruit trees
down the fields of an abstraction.
A sense of permutation followed smilingly
along amid glad pipings, a kind of beneficent,
slightly doddering deity.
Open carefully and insert pastoral interlude
gazed on shyly by flowers brushed by sap-laden vines.
Now shake in a paper bag till uniformly coated.
Yet in those days, things felt choric.
Was that the truly happy childhood, saying over and over
I love my daddy?
It is words rather than apples which are forbidden.
But this permission felt like other speech.
I walked behind the house into the crab apple orchard,
bitter as if a spice been crushed against my tongue.
My friend, Juanita, likes other fruits.
And I can think about them, never having
seen the things she names.
We liked each other here outside the house.
The orchard is very quiet now, before the rain,
so that the dolphins seem to rise again and glaze
the edges of the drifting boat.
And I am someone else.