Jewel Case
Too bad Freud's Interpretation
of Dreams—that complex logic
and infinitely mutable design
underlying his wielding the key,
his analysand the lock—never,
even in theory, could be disproved
(like every other religion,
but verboten, the death-kiss,
in science) and so in time
became passé, because of course
the 1920's upper-middle-class matron
who dreamed recurrently
in the depths of the Viennese
mittel-nacht that someone unknown
and sinister was stealing her schmucken-
casten in truth feared some man
wanted to steal her sexuality, her
personhood, her family, her core.
Perhaps those primitive tribes
who hold that dreams foretell
the distant and certain future
possess the correct cosmology.
After all, didn't elegant Frau M
lose more than her jewel-case
not too many years later
there where even the grass
was indelibly inked.
Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved
Mid-American Review, 2006
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