The therapist fresh out of graduate school
fidgets in her chair in the windowless room.
She listens with the yearning to say 
something wise, even one tiny insight
that relieves her patient of his pain.
 
In her training, the clinician learned 
how mastering the transference unlocks 
the cure. The timing of interpretations 
is everything. Last year her supervisor said
“anything can be a defense” and now 
she wonders: is the axiom a defense as well?

Unmoored by theory, she keeps trying 
to find the right interpretation but her mind 
muddies, stomach churns. As the patient 
shouts from the couch his litany of failures, 
the therapist glances, for half a moment, 

at the table beside her chair, where her eyes rest 
on a book she placed close by arranging 
the office last spring. Here the book 
sits, a form of inanimate matter yet 
energized like a talisman or an angel
or a symptom of magical thinking

or perhaps the energy of the good mother
Mary alive as poetic guardian.
The young therapist looks up at the patient
gnawing his thumb and he transmutes
before her eyes into a poem. Unraveled

she sees now he needs not the red pen edits 
of her analysis. This aching art of human being 
needs the space and containment of the notebook’s 
first page, the patience of a pencil revealing dark lines 
and stories of failures told, re-told, revised in shifting
rhythms and silence. No permanent lines 

or pressures of precision. Only Mary’s permission: 
You do not have to be good.
                        

A poet walks into a bakery.
	She orders the toasted baguette with jam. 

	A social worker glances up
from her case notes on the back table, sees
the writer choose the spot in the sunlight, open
	a notebook, grin, cradle her pen. 
Minutes tick as the poet’s hand swims back 
	and forth across the page. Baguette
abandoned. The sheet of paper glistens
	with the butter of her words.

Meanwhile, the social worker picks at her scone, 
	tries to focus on her task another hour

	but longing pools on her tongue, tingles 
	her ribcage, tugs at her gut. The forgotten fruits 
			of her desire shimmer in her mind, 
		quickening her imagination, 
		dissolving impossibilities of dreams. 

	Creative juices pulse through her veins
		from heart to belly,
	her long-suppressed appetite 
	for pleasure laid bare in the body. Like a grizzly 
	waking to the scent of blackberries,
			her stomach growls.