The Reverie Alone Will Do
And so I sing, as the boy does by the burial ground, because I am afraid.
Emily Dickinson
Emily's house in Amherst,
her white dress small as a child's.
Touch a baby chair and see her eyes
like the northern lights,
next to the pale moonscape of her mother's face.
Look out this window
and spy a basket of gingerbread
dancing down the clapboards
to surprise the children away from their games.
Reel with her through summer
Like a firefly in the dimming light,
walking a dog through the fields
in back of the shops,
gone as quick as she'd come
without leaving so much as a footprint.
This girl who would not yield
And so rendered strangers speechless.
Emily in the full bloom of three dozen years
writing a poem a day,
fetching brooks from spotted nooks
and giving them to the sea.
And the sea responding:
her shoes overflowing with pearl,
as his silver heel rests light upon her ankle,
Wild nights! Rowing in Eden.
Touch the lock box on her dresser
and see her sitting in candlelight
as images burn like bits of eerie swamp fire
luring her deeper and deeper
into exquisite binges of language.
Emily at stairtop in the dark,
hanging on every faint word
that drifted up from the parlor below.
as the family entertained there without her.
Once she had been so eager to spark and debate,
But too many times their faces read:
her fire burns too bright.
So night is what sustained her.
Night and Solitude.
No more loneliness!
Pore over her papers
drawing a little letter forth to softly pick its lock,
open its narrow glimpse of infinity,
so flat and cheerful voices
can sidle along the parchment and the years,
lift and grow as large as the singing spheres.
Emily baking bread for her father
And calling him the Sexton behind his back.
She and Lavinia: two little housewives in the grass
And she the smallest,
locked away like a cracked old porcelain cup
saved for sentiment's sake
though no one really wants it any more.
Visit her grave so quiet
with it small patch of ironwork fence,
and imagine her alive instead
drunk in the clover and crazy for bees.
How she leaned against the sun in a reverie!
Here in the name of the butterfly
and the breeze put your faith in perennials,
she'd say, and make a prairie!
Emily writing her poems in pencil
And lightly as a reed bends to the water,
Preparing to shiver scarce, consent,
And then be dead.
So careful to leave behind what was in her head:
a thousand secret songs sung in a small voice
luminous as a soul.
These she could control,
Leaving them like Hansel's
white stones in the woods:
little bits of light
to help us navigate the years
as they helped her.
Emily gone
among the eider names unafraid.
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