Then maybe two points from-- and there's
another group of poems in this book with titles
that work very differently.
They're not one word titles as most of those are.
The two poems I'm going to read-- there is their titles.
The first of them is called "The Interpretation of Dreams"
and the second one is called "Civilization
and its Discontents."
The writing of these caused me great pleasure.
Central to that pleasure was the fact that when a friend called
me and asked if I could come out and play, I said, no,
I'm sorry, I can't.
I have to write "Civilization and its Discontents" tonight.
Though each of the poems refers at some point to Freud,
the poems are not transistorized book reviews in any way.
And they refer as much to the sense
we have that we know what Freud meant even though we haven't
really read him and we just sort of know it
by breathing the cultural air.
And in a couple of places, I actually
quote passages from his writings.
This is called "The Interpretation of Dreams."
"What animals dream of I do not know.
The urchin cat we rented with the house
was sun-stunned one minute and twitched the next, pursued
by humans maybe.
The valley could be dreaming the haze that filled it, both it
and I replete, like a wound cat sleeping.
The walled hill towns we drove to nights
in search of the perfect pasta also curled in on themselves
like nutmeats.
How I loved those stone towns, stark against fire,
the houses rising like tamed bluffs.
Fortification is a way of life.
When I imagined an afternoon nap in Gubbio,
let's say, I dream of light, mild cousin to fire, bristling,
its blind raised like a bottle brush down house facades
until they flecked the stony street beds.
Then I'd rise and walk in diminishing circles
al centro, where there's a church and a square,
a blare of blank space amidst all that habit and stricture.
How often I've arrived at myself like that, as in a dream.
Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious, where
the circuits of self-dramatization
complete themselves endlessly.
The dream work, Freud called it, like fireworks,
which require hours for their preparation
and then flare up in a moment.
Daydreams like mine of Gubbio imitate
such condensation and release, though they
lack that umbilical tether to the other world that makes
dreams art and daydreams gossip.
And daydreams can be broken off at sluggish will like mine.
But dreams have their own urgencies.
The other night I dreamed I was shaking myself awake
beside that waif cat, dead now for two years.
Let's go to Gubbio tonight and eat tortellini.
How long it takes to make them right
and how they flare up in the mouth like sunspots,
both dense and evanescent."