A Night with Mesmer—

Creteil, France 1784

-Cosumnes River Journal, Spring 2008 

 

Tonight was a night of belief

I sat near a barrel filled with iron filings

                    The water inside is magnetized, he said

                    he instructed that I grip the protrusions—

the iron rods—

                    he called them soul dragging wands

because he believes the universe is suffused with a kind of living

                   magnetic fluid, pervading all bodies

                   following the motion

                   of planets and tidal and atmospheric changes

and he danced around me—stretching and skewing

the subtle fluid inside of me to create harmony

 

Before tonight, I had heard accounts of spells

                                                                and convulsions,

    of inducing crisis to disappear disorders

and I came still,                                        despite the rumors of why he left Vienna—

the blind musician, Maria—I was told she lost her disability pension

and I came still,                                          because I was sick,

                                                                  because Paris' walls of prayer are crumbling,

                                                                  because tonight

in a country monetarily and spiritually bankrupt—

                                              I was in a trance

because so much attention had never been given to me

because a man in a robe of lilac silk, played a series of glass bowls

                                                          varying in size to provide a scale,

and he said to me:

This is your song, it is aligning the magnetism in you—

                                                          connecting you to everything—

so that you may know now

                                           that you belong here