WIEN IX, BERGASSE 19
By Ruby Eastwood
‘The wall with the exit door is behind my head, and seated against that wall, tucked into the corner, is the Professor.’
H.D. Tribute to Freud
The way the light falls across the shelves,
the mounted gods, their slanted shadows.
Above her, a steel engraving of the Temple at Karnak.
He is always out of view,
his presence projected on the walls.
He hides himself, or so he says,
to aid the flow of free association.
She would like to tell him what she has discovered
about her brain and womb,
one connected flesh,
milk white and translucent like a jellyfish.
But he wouldn't understand something as amorphous,
as ill-defined, as ecstasy or music, only
the self folded along symmetrical creases,
the world structured by symbols.
He is like her father
whose eyes focused on nothing
nearer than the moon.
Like her father, he has hidden himself behind her.
He says, the problem is
I am an old man
You do not think it worth your while
To love me.
You are taller than me, he says.
No, she says, I have come to have my dreams
returned to me as revelation,
I have journeyed unimaginable distances
to reach you.
Outside these four walls destruction plays like an adagio,
and she knows that soon he will be leaving.
The gods will be wrapped in newspaper, boxed up and sent away,
and in the future in which they arrive unbroken,
she will greet their return with gardenias.
He gives nothing away.
She thinks this is just as much for his sake
as for hers,
fear of seeing, fear of being seen.
Ruby Eastwood is a writer and filmmaker living in Dublin.
