Jung's Jewess

Poems by Pamela Moore Dionne


He told me he loved Jewish women. That he wanted to love a Jewish girl. Am I a goal?
And Jung, the blonde Aryan who knows little of life under the boot, is he my goal?

When he was five, his mother in hospital, the maid held him, rested her head on his shoulder.
Her skin a copper coin, the curve of her throat in its collar – this mystery the child's goal.

His dreams are sexual, full of the Jewess. His fingers walk my neckline. I am the one.
The icon his impulse desires above all women. My heart beats faster so near my goal.

Fixations are illusion – wake the magician and find what's left is a man
who only comes alive in the mirror, a man who is his own eye's goal.

I was my friend's analytic case. Now I am his muse and, yes, his mistress. I tightrope
between nosegays of violets and his children's scattered toys. I understand my goal.

God! Would that I could simply walk away. Free of myself. Free of him. I want redress.
A childhood all pinafores and dangling braids. I want separation, my body from my goals.

Perhaps it is the force carried by this name – Spielrein. Play pure. Be without sin.
Is this the thing that locks me into unconvention? Is this my gaol? My goal?