jungian dream therapy
by Luisa Igloria

Each Saturday afternoon in the summer
months, my daughters and I bring our journals
to a quiet room in the primary school,

where Sister Ann leads workshops in Jungian
dream therapy. Today she leans on the blackboard
and its chalky palimpsest—faint ladders of A's and E's

still propped and visible against the darker
ground; kindergartener's loops for netting
vowels, eddies of language like swirled

echoes beneath the silence. Ann's
wearing corduroy slacks and an olive sweater,
frayed at the wrists. Write, she says,

fingering a thread- as though you
are climbing down a well without water.
We have separate wells but we want

to find the underground current, the humid pit
from which our same dreams come with their desperate
perfumes, or when they don't, the same dank

restlessness. Climb further—and further down,
to the end of the rope dangling like an abandoned
bell pull in the leveled tower of your life. Imagine

the pail that once swung there, awaiting
the tug of a hand somewhere above, rust
growing in orange scales around its edge, the taste

of water and metals corroding in the mouth.
Everywhere, there is some kind of debris, dun-
colored brick falling out of the stonework, walls

softening like moss so if you leant all
your weight on them, the pillars might come
down in a cloud of grey powder and ash. Kneel

on the floor and lift the stones there too, away
from the earth that holds them for now.
You are mistaken if you think you've come

to the bottom, the end of the story. Your mouth is dry,
your lips chapped. You've forgotten the color
of your shirt, the pattern of vines that once

adorned the yoke of your dress. Your hair's a ragged
mat of uncarded fibers, dreaming of fingers that once
ran smooth as desire through them. You're truly

parched now, looking for the one plant in the jungle
and its secret cache of moisture, digging with your hands
for the water table, the place you'd somehow forgotten

was the source of all rivers, all dreams, all tears; their welt
and sting the one remaining string, dry scattering of salts
that rained, once, from between the thighs of the Mother.

© Luisa Igloria