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Trying to Get HomeRichard E. MesserPublished online: 27 May 2009.

To cite this article: Richard E. Messer (2009) Trying to Get Home, PsychologicalPerspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought, 52:2, 246-247

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332920902880895

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Psychological Perspectives, 52: 246–247, 2009Copyright c© C. G. Jung Institute of Los AngelesISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00332920902880895

Trying to Get Home

Richard E. Messer

An aged man is but a paltry thing;/a tattered coat upon a stick,/unless soul clap its hands and sing,/and louder sing. . .

—W. B. Yeats

The third cup of coffee doesn’t help the rain-delayin my brain, my body is like that half buried logI once tried to lift out of the ooze. It shiftedwith a sucking noise, branches snapped off,rotted bark sloughed away and too lateI realized it would never catch fire.

But I have to go home. Which means fieldingfamily goodbyes and a long ride to the airport—this is Atlantawhere April breathes the full green Word—and now somehowit is Detroit and I 94, lined with forlorn trees flickingminty cloven tongues at me. My mind insistsI’m here, yet I know I’m back there with my daughter,who has children of her own now. My time-warped soulis smoldering like a funky motel mattress. I’m sittingat the kitchen table in my own apartment, and in the cornergreat black wings unfold. I remembera snail trail in my grandmother’s garden, a twilight senseof animals known only by twig snap, leaf shiver.

Did my grandmother look into my eyes and seeher father? Isn’t the soul always back there, fumblingwith old photographs, going down worn pathsthat lead to weedy vacant lots? It doesn’t do any goodto stumble after these vanishings—yet I do,deeper into the dark thickets, urged on by coy whispers;

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RICHARD MESSER � TRYING TO GET HOME 247

never mind my bruised knees and the cobwebs across my face.I have to know: have I spent my life trying to wake up?Or go to sleep? All I’m sure of at this momentis that prose may be the arbiter of this life,but poetry is its lover.

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