Unconscious Ode 

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. Now that, as
 
others say, she’s passed, I like to visit churches
that display the uncorrupted remains of saints
 
and their sculpted bodies, the garment hems
smooth from being touched. No one but Bernadette
 
could see the beautiful smiling child in white
who called herself Immaculate, but thousands
 
came to Lourdes to watch her witnessing
that miracle. The blind, lame and dying still
 
arrive in buses. 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
 
affirming an uncontaminated world
in the midst of escalating misery and also
 
the body in pain. I don’t believe my mother
is immortal or scattered over the earth
 
or even alive in me. But in dreams, which let
the unconscious speak in puns and symbols,
 
she sometimes returns, often thin and naked
but occasionally healthy, wearing
 
her elegant work clothes. Sometimes she sits with me
beside a hanging garden whose flowers,
 
because they are so heavy, bloom abundantly,
their weight enabling the blooming, then
 
greater heaviness and more blooming.