UNCONSCIOUS ODE

7 8 Y U N C O N S C I O U S O D E A N N K E N I S T O N Now that my mother, as others say, has passed, I like to visit churches that display the miraculously intact bodies of saints in glass cases. Sometimes the hem of their carved garment is smooth from being touched. No one but Bernadette ever saw the beautiful smiling child in white who called herself Immaculate, but thousands came to Lourdes to watch her witnessing that miracle. Even the faithful, it seems, require an intermediary between themselves and what’s invisible. In each of us, my mother thought, there exists a hidden essence, mostly evident as pain or desire or the compulsion to repeat, not immortal soul but the unconscious. Her life’s work was to find and comfort it. In buses, the blind, lame and dying still make pilgrimages to Lourdes. Past the kitschy shops, the spring Bernadette scrabbled in the dirt to find, and the porch cluttered with abandoned canes and wheelchairs, they press their hair and faces against the muddy wall, the enormous church behind them a≈rming an uncontaminated world in the midst of escalating misery and also the body in pain. I don’t believe 7 9 R my mother is immortal or scattered over the earth or even alive in me. But in dreams, which are how the unconscious speaks, redundantly, in puns and symbols, she sometimes appears, often thin and naked but occasionally healthy, wearing her elegant work clothes, and sits with me beside a hanging garden like the wondrous, vanished one in Babylon, in which the flowers, because they are so heavy, bloom abundantly, their weight enabling the blooming, then greater heaviness and more blooming. ...