Journey Of Storms
by Paula Bramsen Cullen
A book of insights into the process of psychotherapy and the healing of the mind.
COUSIN
I am not cousin
to thinking brain
or upright stance.
I am pointed ears,
cat-clawed feet,
a tusk-toothed fearsome thing
living in shielded rock.
When it suits me
I am a child
wet from the cavern,
three breaths old,
my face screwed up in puzzlement
at a world turned hard and bright.
How did I come to such a crossing?
Was it space outgrown
or ache to stretch straight my tiny bones
and hear unmuffled by her flesh
my howls of shock
to taste the world.
I’d like to think my borning
was such a consequence
but to be true
I was moved by mountains
as are we all of small account
moved by peaks of time and space.
By these we live our years
but first the forces congregate
to push us from the womb
and greet a world
gone mad with mountains.
To be like him.
To live in his skin.
To sleep in his bed.
To think in his head.
To put on his clothes.
To bring forth his prose.
To sit in his chair
breathing his air,
touching his hair
that half isn’t there.
To be Jewish like him.
To be part of his kin.
We would sit and discuss
what the world’s done to us.
And we would nod and know.
I am
wooden.
To live
I am wooden.
My children
tap on me.
My husband
leans on the wood.
They think
the wood is
Mother
Wife.
To allow life
its shadowed stain
I’ve had to become
wood.
To feel what
wood
would feel,
which is nothing.
You’re thinking icicles
I’m thinking paint.
You’re thinking handball
I’m thinking saint.
You’re thinking Freud
I’m thinking dreams.
You’re thinking projection
I’m thinking scream.
We touched a moment
six thoughts ago
as I bore left
and you turned right.
We surely met
in the narrows there.
Both met, thinking
bananas.
Why that word? Why just that sound?
You thought yellow, I thought round
and we met at
bananas.
What joy to touch
before we leaped away again
to think of slipping
and tarantulas.
If only you would love me
lock your hand in mine
bend down deep to breathe me
touch my sigh
please love me.
I am one of the others
far away from you
apart more than together.
First Seder, Lent, Hebrew.
If you’d press me with your body
caress me with your eyes
with you I’d be familiar
then you I’d soon despise.
All it would take to decathect you
would be your first embrace
then free I’d be of longing.
And trust?
Why, not a trace.
I stumbled across my analyst
at the library today,
not in the flesh
but in a prodigious tome.
It seems he wrote me up,
disguised me with a number
but I knew me,
he couldn’t fool me.
It made me mad
to be discussed in that objective way.
Of course, I’d have been madder still
had he ignored me.
I also was quite sure I knew
patients numbers one and two.
One of two’s demeanor
preceded me on Fridays
and number one, I’m almost sure
was always coming in the door
as I was leaving Tuesdays.
What kind of inelegant ballet
are we dancing, dancing?
We dip and bow
elastic legs
rubber arms.
You are the one who spins me
keeping your hands
nearly touching my waist
but just shy of it,
allowing me to spin ’til dark if I choose.
When time and the lights are right
we do beautiful work together
moving with sweeping grace
to stop the heart.
But then the second violin
breaks a string.
The oboe goes astray
and plays a seventh low.
You trip
I slip
and we land sprawling
on the sawdusted floor.
Like the great right whale
slaps the water with his giant tail fin
before rushing deep
where green becomes black
and turns level
to soar through the lightless sea.
Why, the growing’s gone on underground!
An impulse, pure electric,
shivered through the soil
and rammed the buds to life.
Now they’re sprouting in abandon
not a seasonal progression of blooms
but superfluity.
Somehow the persistence and the pain
locked atoms and bonded into gain
producing an impulse
so pure and strong
to make a physicist grin.
I can spin a tale,
grow a child,
hold my man.
Why, the glory of it
and the brightness of the hue.
Oh, the things I can do.
Emerging from confusion so deep and dark
it consumed any ray escaping.
I’m finally
at last
tasting the sun.
Death is the only experience
from which one cannot learn a lesson.
