Tag: Boyhood

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A Session of Therapy

I was browsing recently in the works of my late friend Georg Garner, about whom I have written at some length already. This is what I stumbled on.

“[Il y a eu] un certain développement historique qui fait que, désormais, il faut faire tout un parcours psychanalytique pour retrouver l’Autre à l’intérieur, et non pas dans cette extériorité que le social aussi bien que le médiatique lui réservent.” (Les travaux d’Oedipe, p. 25.)

The way history has evolved we must from now on resort to psychoanalysis in order to find the Other within ourselves and not in the outer realm where society and its media project it.

***
The same day the following poem emerged: 

When it comes to incinerating
ants with a magnifying glass
or capturing bees bare-handed
to sequester them in old jam jars
filled with honeysuckle, breathing holes
punched by nail through their tin lids,
I’m passed master, though these minor
feats lie indistinct in the past.
The cruelty I practice now
begins with my own self, whom
I treat more like a bee than an ant.

***
In Truth Serum

 

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Shinny

I was a boy myself once so don’t need
much told me about trees. I know to hide
in their boughs and filch their illicit fruit
before it falls to the ground and takes root.
I know to shinny up high then clamber
to where branches thin and the climber
feels a pit suddenly yawn in his guts,
up where twigs extend to buds, where height hurts.
Something about a tree doesn’t really mind
the theft of its fruit. A tree is resigned
to a boy swaying in his tenuous
crotch, dizzy at his chosen precipice.
Something about a tree wants to be climbed.
Something about a boy wants to climb it.

***

Probably the less said about this poem, the better: a distant echo of Frost’s “Birches”, this crypto-sonnet bears the alternative title “Onanism”. Related to this earlier poem, “Sad To Be a Child”.