Bleeding Tree
BY EDWARD SALEM
I have two therapists
who don’t know about each other.
I’ve been seeing one for three years,
the other’s brand new.
I see the old one monthly,
the new one weekly.
The old one’s a Vienna-trained
Jungian analyst. The new one, a less
intellectual, soul-forward
‘dynamical dialectic humanist’
drawing from mindfulness,
cognitive behavioral therapy,
and psychoanalysis. I do dream work
with the Jungian. I told him
I dreamt of Eddie Izzard
stepping on my balls,
toenails painted succulent red.
We talked about class and he told me
I’m part of the intelligentsia, implying
I’m better than the vacuous wealthy.
He said dictatorships first kill off
the intelligentsia, that’s how prized,
how valuable I am.
I told the dynamical humanist I envied her
for valuing human connection above all else.
I’d rather have another zero
at the end of my paycheck
or a well-reviewed book, I said.
We talked about my father’s poverty,
how he wiped his ass with stones,
shitting in a village field among other
dried human shit. Living in a house
with no plumbing or electricity,
no kitchen or bathroom.
A home improvement meant
carving a hole to squat over
behind the cement staircase.
The family ate meals by hand
sitting in a circle around firewood
in a windowless stone house built into a hill
so many grandfathers ago, no one
knows which ancestor built it.
I told her how I
suck down carbonated corn syrup,
ice cold, spiced and sweet,
while my father didn’t drink ice water
till I don’t know when.
We discussed class consciousness,
class complex, and she said, alternately,
classist, classicist, classism,
with an unsteadiness I read as unfamiliarity.
She’s soul-forward, she makes me feel
heard and deeply understood,
whereas I often feel pressure to entertain,
to interest, my Jungian analyst.
I told him I dreamt of snapping twigs in two,
defecating in a peaceful squat.
Of a Cairene on the Nile
with a marigold neck tattoo
and a male-hating glare, capturing scarabs
and dressing them in bikinis.
Of crops irrigated with sewage water,
and wet mohawks shaped by praying hands.
I told him I dreamt that Buddha was a cow,
and Buddhism was an orange milk
that curdled and reeked as I drank.
I told him I dreamt of a bleeding tree.
Succulent red.
