Copernicus, Darwin, Freud

You are right in saying that the enumeration in my last

paper may give the impression of claiming a place beside

Copernicus and Darwin. But I did not want to give up

the interesting chain of thought on that account...

Freud to Karl Abraham

I

The man who fell out of the sky? Of course!

One can ask: did he fall?

Was he pushed? In any event,

When the methane clouds

Had swirled away forever

And the yellow atmosphere burned blue,

Fomenting suns and stars,

His substance grew too heavy for the sky.

Suddenly he came down.

The sky itself was lighter for his loss,

Lifted a bit from earth. Below,

He looked around. He stamped the ground.

He filled his lungs with air, and walked

Around the meadow, looking for a road.

Eventually, he lost

The memory of that coming-down

As what had happened to his very self,

But kept, somehow, a sense

That somewhere there, in all that blue, up there,

Remains a secret hole, a place

Where a body was, its absence now

A kind of wound the stars can't cauterize,

The clouds can't bandage and the wind can't cool.

Il

The man who climbed down from the tree?

Suppose one midnight

When the fangs were sleeping,

He dropped down, branch by branch,

(One broke as he swung free),

And hunkered, quailing,

Out of the brush into a clearing, where

The ground was rough with rocks

Whose fragments could be sharpened, notched and sped

Or drilled to smoulder and to burst aflame.

That flame

Could keep the fangs at bay,

Light up tomorrow for a million years.

He took his woman, looking in her face.

Breaking a little further from the mesh

Of fear and hunger into know and choose,

He prowled the clearings, seeking for a rock

But never looking back.

The broken branch swung just above the ground.

Il

The man who rolled out of bed?

Him, too; with all who rolled there with him.

His mother, first; his loss his gain, he made

A carnal empire out of sudden exile.

And afterwards, each time

The knives of choices turned him stiff with fear,

He crept back to it, nourishing

Omnipotence with dreams and dolls.

Somehow, it ended always with

His rolling to the bed's edge,

Then thumping to the floor.

It's not the easiest way

To wake up from a dream. Disturbing, too,

Once he stood up,

To look down at the bed, and see

A little drop of blood upon the sheets.

Yet they'd been washed and ironed that very week.

Where did it come from? Why the sudden fear

That it was slowly spreading as he looked?

He rubbed the sore spot on his head

And turned to go off somewhere,

Leaving at his back

A secret hole that's somewhere in the sky

A broken branch that's swinging from a tree

A little stain that spreads along the sheets.