JUNG'S MOTEL

three poems

by

Nancy A. Henry

THEY BRING PASTEBOARD MIRRORS
TO THE WEST INDIES

Before they came
we began finding strange
and useless things washed up
on the shore after a great tide.

They came from the belly
of a huge ugly boat.
They were hungry and white
filthy and bad-smelling
their teeth falling out.

We fed them breadfruit, bananas
fish. Some asked to stay.
One they killed for it
with a loud stick that made a hole
in him as big as a coconut.

They came bringing us
little flat pools of light
for looking into.
For these they took the pearls
which we had in abundance,
shell necklaces, spices.

We laughed ourselves blind.
What good were these things
to the Ghost Men ?

They could not know our deep
delight in our dusky faces
beautifully smiling back at us
from the palms of our hands.

JUNG’S MOTEL

Here in the nightstand drawer
no Gideon’s Bible, but
The Golden Bough.

Oh Carl! The curtains
wear Mandalas,
the Peyote tea's the finest.

In the bathroom
with its tiled echoes
and metaphoric plumbing
our reflections come back to us
mask-like, above a sink
that is a vortex of all
the mythic rivers of the dreamworld.

DIVINE MADNESS

A schizophrenic is in fact a very
advanced poet with her wordsalad
her gentle dreamy way of stringing
words together on the fine shining
threads of her delusion. These sounds
grouped in families, these visceral
associations that fall together
without the stentorious intervention
of the rational censor which attaches himself
to our brain a few moments after wakening.

We can only mine the rich territory
of our deeper consciousness for a few moments
where memory sense, color run together
in a rich, kaleidoscopic fluid.

She is already there.
It is her home. She will not visit
our staid, ordered world,
little blocks of time, labels on things,
definitions all laid out in rows.