Patron Saint of Embalmers

    Depending on what staple sustenance was fed to you as a child—beans, mustard greens, lamb balls in tamarind gravy,

    TV dinners on aluminum trays, each food groupin its own compartment, or candy dots on paper—

    the souvenirs of excavations will either teeter-totter the dramaof your dreams, or teach you the tools of the forensic trade.

    It goes without saying, the-sent-to-bed-without-dinnerwill dream of platters of meat and melons. And the overstuffed will

    dream of volcanoes and canoes. Freud believed dreams act as guardiansof our sleep, sentinels posted at the damp entrance of the unlit cave—

    though he felt contempt for philosophers and their futile word games.It goes without saying that meanings fluctuate and multiplicity is desired,

    as in variety packs of little individual cerealsand sack as many women as you can.

    At sixteen I was watching The Exorcist with myItalian-American boyfriend in a movie theater just hours after

    his freshly-expelled from the Rhode Island School of Designschizophrenic brother came after us with a bat.

    On screen the girl is confined to bed in a white nightgown,her head rotating faster than any planet around its sun.

    If I had said The Patron Saint of Embroiderers,how much softer would this soliloquy be?

    Everyone knows well-fed children score higher on intelligencetests and an embalmer is trained to forestall decomposition

    and make suitable for public display. In ancient Egyptit involved levering open the mouth of a mummy

    so the deceased could commence to eat ducks and lotusesand leeks again in the afterlife.

    Freud loved the boiled beef of Tafelspitz,but we don’t know if he ever ate banana cream pie.

    At eight years old, in the middle of the night,he entered his parents’ bedroom and urinated on their floor.

    And his father declared The boy will come to nothing.I have been accused of circumventing, and

    though it sounds like a balmy breezebillowing through the house, it means I

    evade, avoid, skirt. Should I have just toldyou straightaway, that my movie date’s name

    was Paul Mecurio, and he was my first love?And like his brother, he had a “break”

    and only an undersized trace of himwas ever found in a Florida everglade?