On Reading Freud’s Mourning & Melancholia
First light nosing up from fog slipcovers
and I’m having a conversation with Freud
who it turns out preferred evening so we argue
over morning vs. mourning which is wholly
what he meant but I’m explaining how each
morning is new and isn’t at the same time
while the dog hunches next to me on the too-small
couch as though he’s aware it’s too short this life
he and I share even though he’s bored by my reading
aloud about mourning which in Freud’s paper decries
a regular reaction to loss—usually a dead someone but
also sometimes a dead something—I sub in my own words
innocence, youth, opportunities missed or misused not
to be confused with regret and further, to clarify, melancholia
is like the lingering ache of dryer lint, the last of it you can’t
get rid of—itchy steel wool suit of shitty mornings that
come to greet the evening with just as much gray plump doom
and maybe the dog’s dead in this scenario too or maybe you
just think about it all going drain-swirled and empty—
coffee mug, couch, sky, pages—and Freud goes on here
basically saying mourning is normal and finite and not
medical while melancholia requires attention and probably
you needed back then to be locked up in a sanitarium and now
you just scroll and scroll and scroll and try for misguided
attention or self-harm the way he tells it you will lose
interest in the outside world—sky and dog included—
and you’ll sort through the sock drawer of grief, unmatched
by your own melancholia tentacles and turn away from reality
the way my dog has left the couch learning again I won’t
keep scratching his spit-slewn chin all day which is his
own kind of sadness but I keep on dotting the air
with Freud’s words—which to sum up a long paper
says that mourning is acceptable and melancholia isn’t—
like come on already with your anvil-dragging aches
and he goes on to say that melancholia treads the swampland
between mourning & narcissism but keep in mind this view
of his and how his own daughter had not yet died and when
she did—two years later in quick succession his grandson too—
Freud took it all back and what I’m saying now as I wander the yard
in search of the dog and crumple Freud’s paper to use later as fire fodder
these words are not really for Freud—more for the orioles, kingfishers,
lowly house wrens with their muddied red caps, more for the dog
who will always find his way home. This is what I wish for you.
Photo credit: Lou Rouse
Emily Franklin's debut poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here was published by Terrapin Books in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, New Ohio Review, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, Epoch, The Rumpus, River Styx, and Cimarron Review among other places as well as featured on National Public Radio and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.
Art: Creative Commons