Been having dreams in which my dolls address me,
dummies hardly dumb, their wooden traps
agape with contradiction. In my act
I make them speak the patter I've invented --
Socrates a recapitulation
of Plato's more amusing dialogues,
Galileo in his modern role,
great scientist against the Inquisition,
Darwin a durable hero, Freud the final
word in psychological penetration.
Encapsulating history in comics,
colorful gridlock, wisdom in balloons,
my version of the past reduces them
to entertaining forebears of the present
superior to their contemporaries
by virtue of resemblance to ourselves:
Freud the friend of sexual self-indulgence,
Darwin the man who made God obsolete,
Galileo's love of liberties,
Socratic method and the rights of gays.
But in my nightmares how confused they seem!
Freud complains the world misunderstands him,
shows me a nine-floor tower filled with books:
Freud's Religion, Freud's Philosophy,
Freudian Tips on Gardening Indoors,
millions of titles on every conceivable topic.
We climb a winding staircase, floor by floor,
pull down some books at random, open up
the fat ones and the thin ones, folios,
octavos, quartos, duodecimos,
all masterworks of individual craft
lovingly bound by hand in human skin
and every typeface different. But the text,
no matter what the title, always says,
"Sex explains it: scientific sex."
Ultimately we reach the tower's roof.
Mountains west, a river to the east,
farms to the south, a city to the north.
On all four sides I look straight down the walls
and nowhere does the tower have a door.
I see a volume balanced on the edge.
"Freudian Ventriloquism" -- author?
Me. My name in gold leaf on the spine.
The text? More sex. More scientific sex.
"How do things work? How do things fit together?"
The voice of Darwin or the voice of Freud?
I turn to look and find myself on deck
a sailing ship, its prow a beagle-snout.
The simian dummy Darwin has addressed me.
He sweeps his arm to emphasize the question,
indicates the animals on board:
dodos, giant turtles, kangaroos,
platypuses, bison, tiny flies,
an ark of oddities. Darwin sneezes.
"Where did the future come from?" he inquires.
"When will the past begin?" My nausea
propels me to the railing where I find
the dummy Galileo dropping mammals
overboard to see how fast they fall.
The ship heels and becomes a leaning tower:
I see my book on Freud slip off the edge.
It falls beside an otter and they hit
the river at exactly the same time.
The otter swims away. The book pursues it
lustily with one thing on its mind.
I lose my balance, start to fall, and hear
(the voice of Socrates or Galileo?)
"How do things work? How do things fit together?"
I'm swimming beside a Socrates in drag.
She hugs me from behind and hauls me over,
strong despite resistance, to the shore.
"Tell me, have you ever asked a question?"
I blink at her. I don't know what she means.
"Have you ever wondered how Xanthippe
felt about her husband's peccadilloes?"
"Consider the cultural milieu of ancient Greece . . ."
She cuts my lecture short. "Does ancient grease
do anything but harden in the pan?"
Then all the animals that Galileo
dropped from the tower gather in a circle
with me and Mrs. Socrates inside it.
"The Great God Pan has died," they sing together.
"Don't panic. If you panic he will rise,
a tidal river coursing in reverse
that overflows its banks and drowns the city."
I panic and the river pulls me under.
No Socrates to save me now, no question:
good as dead. I never learned to swim.
But then the sun comes up, the river dries,
a voice I've never heard says "Only vapor."
Other voices, voices I've invented,
gather near me now and form a chorus,
Socrates, Galileo, Darwin, Freud
sing "Praise the Sun and penetrate the vapor."
But I myself can't sing. I have no tongue.
What does it mean? How does it fit together?