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Here are three fairly short
poems from a fairly long series

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in progress.

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The name of the series
is From Freud's Window.

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And each section of the poem
has a truncated epigraph

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from The Interpretation
of Dreams.

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If anybody's read Jonathan
Williams' wonderful book,

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the Loco Logodaedalist
in Situ, I

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used his method of
taking a little file card

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and cutting out a
window, which he

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did for Havelock Ellis' text.

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He did all of the poem that way.

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I just got the epigraph from it.

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At any rate, what I hope is that
the truncated epigraph provides

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something of the sense of
distortion or a displacement

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that Freud describes
as characteristic

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of dreams or dreamwork.

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I should also say that in
the first of the short poems,

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there are a lot of strange
Whitmanisms and quotations

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from Whitman floating
around, the strangest

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I take it being the word
promulge, which is Whitmanian,

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a kind of bombastic version
of to publish, advertise,

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or announce, usually
applied to oneself.

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From Freud's Window, one.

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The epigraph.

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The work of a censorship, which
no longer takes the trouble

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to conceal its operation.

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Gaps are the beginning.

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It lurches on in splotches,
riddling holes with blotched,

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receding light.

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Nature wasn't the only thing
which wanted to abhor a vacuum,

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stamping its petulant
feet in tiny cacophonies,

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a gilded Pavlova.

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What remained got antsy when
discussed could scarcely

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be addressed.

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They practiced magic tricks
with your most highly prized

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possessions.

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Doctor, I would
like, if possible,

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to arrange my removal
from all these spaces.

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The cough was polite, but you
weren't the one who vanished.

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From the mid, the
easily written,

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loose-fingered fakes and chords,
you learn to love the remnants.

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Ragtag, gaudy, and bedecked
in intense availability,

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like women in
dreams, for a while.

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Imagining oneself as
one of the toy soldiers

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was discouraged, and rightly so.

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So we promulged,
correctly lurking

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in corners in a
prescribed fashion,

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under a thunder which no longer
necessarily presaged relief.

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It will be summer
here for a long time,

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one feels, the white knights
of the city dazzling the mind

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and haunting it into the new
lesson, repeated until everyone

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grows glassy-eyed.

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One gazes at the moon,
forgetting his name

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in the new dispensation, as
someone senses slowly moving

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through the mouth lost words
which have made you disappear.

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Two.

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And the epigraph this time from
the interpretation of dreams

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is the right-- and this
is very truncated--

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the right to be
treated in my dream

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as a reincarnation of the
prehistoric old nurse.

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So she glowered at everyone,
wrinkling her eyeballs

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in terrific frenzy.

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Pretty scary, huh?

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The landscape turns into a
house with too many corners

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and closets.

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A stairway which led to
trouble in deeper recesses.

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Sometimes we didn't
want to live there.

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The child always
crying, let's move.

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Let's move.

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The picture trapped you.

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The friendly pink
house rendered sinister

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by its huge paintbrush, the
gate which projected forward

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from the picture plane,
commenting ceaselessly

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on life and art.

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The sky receded above
like a corridor.

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You won't get out by going
further in, they said.

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And you won't get
out by getting out.

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They wreathed you in
their shifting smiles

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like moons reflecting in
a sea of something which

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wasn't like water or shadows
within a complicity gesturing

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in blinks of the otherwise
constant light toward extending

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pickets which
seemed about to lead

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beyond the enclosing flatness.

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They knew about art as
they knew about your life,

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one learned, discovering
the lesson which

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lurked there, a
vague, archaic dragon

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at the edges of the pretty,
always smaller yard.

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And would tell you each time you
thought you had strayed there

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only too gladly what they knew.

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I forgot to say that's based
on a painting by Max Ernst.

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And a final section also
with an epigraph from Freud,

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hence at the same
time as five others

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and had therefore been
her father's favorite.

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That was one view of it.

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Configurations twine
through fruit trees

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down the fields
of an abstraction.

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A sense of permutation
followed smilingly

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along amid glad pipings,
a kind of beneficent,

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slightly doddering deity.

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Open carefully and
insert pastoral interlude

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gazed on shyly by flowers
brushed by sap-laden vines.

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Now shake in a paper bag
till uniformly coated.

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Yet in those days,
things felt choric.

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Was that the truly happy
childhood, saying over and over

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I love my daddy?

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It is words rather than
apples which are forbidden.

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But this permission
felt like other speech.

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I walked behind the house
into the crab apple orchard,

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bitter as if a spice been
crushed against my tongue.

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My friend, Juanita,
likes other fruits.

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And I can think about
them, never having

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seen the things she names.

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We liked each other
here outside the house.

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The orchard is very quiet
now, before the rain,

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so that the dolphins seem
to rise again and glaze

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the edges of the drifting boat.

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And I am someone else.

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