Jung and Easily Freudened

When the all-pervasive scent from the grass seed fields enters the house, it is transformed into a ghost. For instance, if you visit a particular room in search of needle and thread, as soon as you enter you are sure you are not alone, or that someone was there before you and is about to return. I say transformed, but how, and by what? Does it work the magic itself, or is it changed by something acting upon it? Is it memory, which can pour itself like honey, or be as still as an icy pond? Quite possibly; likely, even. Because another person can enter the same room on the same mission and feel nothing, and emerge with a sneeze and a groan, cursing her allergies.

Jung and Easily Freudened

Specimen 2

Imagine an ordinary pincushion full of pins, and that this pincushion has been left undisturbed for quite some time, and that microscopic beings of great intelligence have built an advanced harmonious civilization among the pins, and that an old woman on her way through the room happens to notice the pincushion and decides for a vague sentimental reason that she needs a pin, and that with her thumb and index finger she destroys the civilization’s archives, killing the director and his leading scholars, and also topples several buildings, trapping thousands of microscopic beings in silent transparent elevators while ruining a major portion of their solar-powered transportation system, causing also a cataclysmic dust storm, and that one brave, intrepid member of this microscopic race manages to record the entire event though it brings about his own death, and that the few surviving beings flee to a wool cap hanging on a doorknob several light years from the pincushion. Then imagine hearing the woman say, “My goodness. What on earth did I come in here for?”

Poems, Slightly Used, November 26, 2008

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