Sept. 10, 2023
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Hysteria
By Christine Robbins
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Hysteria
By Christine Robbins
“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”
– Studies on Hysteria, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud
If I’ve opened
A portal in my mind
I mean to close it now I mean
To staunch the haunting
Can I do this
By negating the words
Can I do this
By dis-incantation
I’ve never fished with worms
Still curling in the plum never
Faced the sun’s decline
On the only
Shallow river I could find
~
Once my child the one
Who doesn’t claim me now once
My child sat on my shoulders
And covered their eyes and
Said it was me who could not
See to carry them home
A child fantastic their name
A prism turning
I leave
The window open when I can
The nymphs are they
Departed
In the leaf shadow eddy
A ghost canoe
And each of the souls I have loved
~
In the shade out front
A ghost maple named
For the off-white leaves and
The air all around
What elemental part of me
Has died right here before
And why would I abandon
The animal of me
To the mind and its planetary light
~
Words
Could form a portal and
A soul might fall inside
A fiction writer’s hand
It froze after he wrote
Of ways to burn alive
~
Do the dreaming slow
Need a hidden guide
I’ll hang my breath in the ghost leaves
Silver in the rain
I’m waiting for me
The one who left for cigarettes
And still has not returned will she
Come for me
I slept in a strong body
On our hill an unfledged nest
Herons anything but quiet
While they’re waiting to be fed
~
When my small ones were mine
My hands were huge
I do not swim under
The city pipes or swim
Through most of my sleep
My arms
Never chime in the water
Under the city a pipe
The tidal water came in
My child now silent to me
Was almost drowned
And this was hard enough
I do not walk the root line
Of cottonwood trees the roots
Along the water line
I do not sleep cold
On a serpentine rock my hair
Wet from my drool
~
Is slowness an offering
I’m easy to catch
I’ll fade in the bark of a tree
And my time will grow wide
The slowing it’s
Eroding me even
If it’s all in the mind
I ate fire when I was
Young but this
Was an illusion
~
When faith in the self
Pulls from the body
Like a death like a birth
Other elements
Expand
A goldfish
Blooming to the pond’s size
And the frog pipes call
Once I believed
I was brave I untied
Most of the secrets
Set them back in shallow water
A pigeon on the porch
Left by someone else’s cat
The dead eye open mirror
~
The dead bird
I do not believe I saw
Forgiveness in its eye
Women slept in Sibyl caves
Waiting for a dream
Sibyl of Cumae before
She was left in a jar
Whispering
She opened
The hundred speaking mouths
And wings
Are beating by the border
Don’t open the aviary
Open the aviary door
~
A secret needs
A pheromone smell or
Sunlight on a shallow river
Breeze on a plum and worms
And the wonderful flesh
Early autumn or
Autumn come early
I entered
Where the air was unreal
Or real and not named
For its inflammatory nature
~
Beneath the well
The dirt is fragrant
I’m growing
Acquainted with wells
The dirt
Can hold portals of water
My fault is more
Odyssean my want
To have the last word
Once I wrote
A book in the night
And negated most of the verbs
Once I believed
My strength was hollowed out
For shelter
~
Christine Robbins
Christine Robbins lives and works in Olympia, Washington, and has an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. She has poems published in Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Water~Stone Review, West Branch, and others. She was twice a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Editor Prize, where she has a new poem in their poem-of-the-week series.
Author’s Note: This poem addresses hysteria, or conversion disorder, a diagnosis I was essentially given for an otherwise unexplained neurological disorder that affects my movement and speech. This diagnosis is more often given to women, and often in a dismissive manner, as if someone wounded "by the mind" would be less worthy of care.
Image description: A light-haired, smiling woman is sitting on a blue porch, wearing a black shirt and jeans, with a large dog lying at her side.