I read Jung once while falling asleep in the cold dawn

[rowens]

These parts sound the best to me, although the gray hair and the turquoise nails seem like assumptions if this is literally a shadow. The title just seems like a suggestion to float over the poem: you can think of Carl Jung, but don't think too much about him because I only read him once and fell asleep while doing it. These last few stanzas sound the best to me, anyway.


Her gray hair gets longer and longer but never
appears to tangle or break, even when my whole body has become a tangle
of muscle and reed, a tangle of a million limbs in bed or in the rush
to get on and off the subway. Her turquoise nails draw
animal figures in the air. She is shades away from becoming

an animal, from breaking into storm.

At a gathering of gods from places long forgotten she is carrying trays
and bundling white tulips and long grass to give to the leaving, those leaving down
the long and sun-baked steps.

My shadow pretends she does not need connection to the divine
to the round faces carved thousands of years ago in stone,
but only to the beastly clouds tracking across the sky, in the grass.
She prays beneath the statues and the stained glass.

I have seen her at this, my shadow wearing a robe of red light.