In northern Germany the bogs dispense

the modern bodies of prehistoric men,

the corpses lugubriously bobbing up

like a fragile, slow, insistent dream.

And Jung talked of them from first course

to chocolate mousse, waving his teaspoon

in a cheerful maestro’s arc before

Freud’s more and more unfocused eyes.

Humic acid, he explained, consumes the bones

and tans the skin. And what is left to stink

on the surface of the bog are some brown sacks,

empty and lewdly human. “Sometimes I think,”

he laughed, “that this is the immortal part:

the sausage casing and not the human heart.”

At once Freud snapped, “My friend, why do you prate

about these things. It proves you wish me dead.”

Embarrassed, Jung demurred. A moment later

Freud toppled from his chair in a quick faint,

the great Hebraic brain jarring softly on

the rug of Bremen’s finest restaurant.

Once Freud’s mouth was stuffed with dust, Jung struck

from his memoirs: “I shall never forget the look

he cast at me, as if I were his father.

The ten seconds or so he took to float

up through that peculiar public slumber

I held him cradled till he came to—

an awkward Pieta: fathers both, sons both.

Our love was never stronger than the moment

it ended. Bog life is brief. Of Saurians

all that’s left is the wretched crocodile.”