Berggasse 19¹

Vienna, c. 1898

by Heather Treseler

 

Much can be accomplished in the pregnant
pause, in the gap between wish and warrant:
at such intervals, I studied her brunette crown

and the pale travel of skin along her hair’s part,
uneven as a homemade envelope, and the little
black boots beneath her cloaked ankles, resting

on the far side of the davenport: small mute feet,
clutched together like darkly burrowed mammals
asleep in winter’s decay of leaves. Because I knew

Dora’s father, because I myself have been made 
to play the masque of public life, a learned man
tending the ill and addled, because I have suffered 

the schism between desire and others’ appraisal
of my worth, because I have worked the wormwood 
of id into the smoothness of superego, and because 

publicity whets in men a need for privacy, interior, 
replenishment of womanly affection: I endeavored 
to cure her, to restore those trusting girlish instincts 

that, as in the tropism of Alpine ferns, leads them 
to seek the warmth of manly esteem. Little black 
boots at the far edge of the curved davenport; 

delicate crown as soft and brown as a rabbit’s skull; 
symptoms of petite hystérie coinciding with advances 
from Herr K and the onset of her menses, mistaken

for a deadly wound. She dreams of house fires,
her long hair aflame; the jewelry box of her 
genitals barely rescued from conflagration.  

At the end, Otto, of each hour, there is a threshing 
ache in my temples. And elsewhere. As we have
noted, transference can border on contagion. 

Vigilance must be prophylactically maintained. 
Dainty boots, brunette crown, her thin-hipped 
tensile body resting beneath the wainscoting 

lined with carved imagos—Venus of Krems, 
Venus of Willendorf—goddesses of fertility,
the strain of lived pleasure evident in dimpled 

flesh. In Dora, I discern the lure of exogamy:
sexual union with another tribe’s prized women, 
the allure of the foreign gradually made intimate

and familiar. Eros alive in the gap, in the pregnant
pause between wish and warrant, in a virgin’s
dreams and fears, and how I yearn to answer her.

¹Freud worked from apartments at the address of Berggasse 19, Vienna IX, for nearly 47 years. He fled shortly after the Nazis’ invasion of the city in 1938.

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Heather Treseler’s chapbook, Parturition, won the Munster Literature Centre’s 2019 Chapbook Prize in Ireland, and her poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, PN Review, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals, and have won prizes from Missouri Review, The Worcester Review, and Frontier Poetry. Her essays about poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in eight books about American poetry. She is an associate professor of English and the Presidential Fellow for the Arts, Education, and Community at Worcester State University. She lives outside of Boston.