Dear Red

The Soul selects her own Society--
Then--shuts the Door--
To her divine Majority--
Present no more--

Unmoved--she notes the Chariots--pausing--
At her low Gate--
Unmoved--an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat--

I've known her--from an ample nation--
Choose One--
Then--close the Valves of her attention--
Like Stone--

(written by Emily Dickinson)

Dear Red--
Are you at your table--by the window--
Beyond the Evergreens
Where I beheld You once?

In the Room where you welcomed me--
An old Friend--
As though we had been--for a Moment--interrupted
And so easily--Again--picked up?

They think you a hermit, my Red--
A mouse--by baseboard held--defined--
But you are a Heart--Divine by nature
A Soul in Flame--beyond confine--

Dear Red--I know--She is near as your next Breath--
Yet as Distant--as Persia--or Africa's Nile--
A peculiar Torment--a lifesblood of words
For Her--survives--through Eternity's while--

Dear Red--
I know the Heart--forever in debt--
Written out--put Away--folded neatly, like linens--
I know what it Cost--I know what it Meant.
______
for Kenia's challenge at Real Toads

Note: for those who do not know, or read here regularly, when I visited her home in Amherst, in 2007, I felt Emily there; not in any vague sense, but THERE, and personally. She was glad I had come, she welcomed me, and she knew about my writing. It was, for me, an intense and spiritual experience.

E.D. was in love with her sister in law, Susan Huntington Dickinson (see the book "Open Me Carefully") who was married to her brother and lived next door at The Evergreens. The relationship spanned decades, shows up again and again in Emily's poems ("I Cannot Live With You"), and must have been both sustaining and incredibly frustrating for Emily.

I tried to find the version of her featured poem, above, which seemed to me to be most true to Emily's actual style. One of the things I love dearly about her is that she wrote in her own amazing and unique way, resisting advice to write in a style more in keeping with contemporary convention. Up at least into the 1950s, and even today, editors have changed her punctuation, capitalizations, and even her wording, to make it more conventional. (Why?!?) 

When Saints Emptied, White & Weightless, Out Of Heaven

It snowed.
(then it didn't.)

She stayed with him.
(then she didn't.)

The world turned.
The sky was wide and clear
Like a blue fat girl with good skin.

The traffic was rosary beads
moving up one by one,
a honking, half-assed Rapture.

She attended classes.
(then she didn't.)

She was a February gray angel.
(then she wasn't.)

She went out, wearing a pink scarf
and black leather boots.

In a cafe, she met a blue fat girl.
She called her "zaftig."
She said, "You have a beautiful face."

She didn't consider her.
(then she did.)

Again, it snowed.
They went home together,

orbiting each other closely all the way down the street,
like a couple of she-gods
with aprons full
of catnip.
________

for dverse open link #32

What about this Fireblossom....

Would you buy a used car from her?

Trust your child with her?

Do word verification for her? Okay, now I know I've gone too far!

Nice

Nice to see you again.
Nice like slamming the door on my hand,
Nice like cramps,
Nice like kiss my ass.

I wish I had back every word I ever said to you,
So that I could eat them,
So that I could shit them smack in the middle of that sanctimonious crap you call sobriety.

Nice to know you're alive.
Nice like a stick in the eye,
Nice like fuck off and die.

Thought I'd forgive and forget?
Fat chance.
Nice try.
Love was the drug,
But hate is the high.
______

Anya

Until she was 17,
The only big city she had ever seen was Kiev.
At 19, she saw New York,
Chicago,
St. Louis,
Though only from train stations and tracks
That took her past the backs of warehouses
And then out into countryside again.

Peter arrived to take her the last few miles in his wagon;
He introduced himself, looking down at his old boots,
Then hoisted her bag, helped her up,
And took her home.

Wheat is wheat,
Wherever you find it;
Men and women not so different, really, either.
Sometimes he would imitate the way she spoke his name,
With the hard "r",
But his smile and the look in his eyes
Made her lower hers and turn to some task to hide her pleasure at having pleased him somehow.

The sun is the sun,
Wherever you find it;
And night falls warm in summer just the same.
With her head on his chest,
Together in the bed he had built and she had made sweet,
She told him how, when she was a girl,
They would sometimes see the Gypsy wagons going by on the dusty road.
She loved the women's red skirts, and knew then that she would wander.
"And look where I end up," she would say, smiling,
And swing herself on top of him,
Her hair unbound and just beginning to gray.

She was his match, you know,
His Ukrainian wife;
"What does that mean?" he had asked,
So she told him the old saw,
That a Ukrainian wife nags like a mother in law,
Looks like an ox,
And beats you like a Cossack.
Then she brandished a wooden spoon at him, eyes big;
Laughter is laughter,
And a good thing wherever you find it.

Three heads in the afternoon,
She would see across the fields--
Two horses and her husband under a prairie sun.
When late one morning she felt a pain low in her belly,
She kept beating rugs, mucking stalls,
Telling Russian fairy stories to her little Sam;
The one with his daddy's eyes
And her father's silver cross around his neck.

It may be that home is where the onion domes rise,
Or it may be that home is where the wheat grows high;
But life and sweetness are wherever you find them--
Down Ukrainian Gypsy tracks
To American sod.
_______
for the Weekend Challenge at Real Toads, featuring Mary Ann Potter.

I was inspired by this photograph of Mary Ann's, which made me wonder what and who this house had sheltered in happier times, and also by this haunting song written and sung by the spifftastic Emmylou Harris.

  

Ethereal

Come.
Here, where leaden birds have broken all the windows.
Here, where the wind is a wild thing gotten indoors, thrashing.
Here, where waiting is more like living than anything I did before.
Come to this place, Love.
I promise, your kiss does not shock me into seizing insensibility as it did the first time.

Darling,
I savor it.
I beg for it,
Prideless.
I am sick for it as others are for white powder, sharp edges, or the dark cards.

I have waited all night.
I waver, I do not eat anymore.
I wear your clothes, surrounding myself with their emptiness,
Willing them to consume me.

Come.
Here, where reason has slipped away.
Kiss me.
Pull me down into your root-home.
I do not mind your throat with its silenced pulse;
But my own, quick and ceaseless,
Drives me without mercy to insanity's bitterest edge.
_____

for A Word With Laurie at Real Toads. ("ethereal")

Pretty Things

Stars are heavier than dreams--
Five fingers are enough to steal most things.

A dream I'd not yet had arrived today by post.
The mail lady stood there, licked her lips,
Said I owed her.

Dark hair is the hair I like--
You've got the Gypsy kind,
It's always in my eyes.

Rain collects at the lowest point,
And yet it comes from the sky.
Birds' bones are lighter than their feathers.

I swapped the mail lady a stone for a stamp--
She laughed and tossed it in her hand,
Then fixed it in a ring to charm the weather.

Gypsy, do you see what you've done?
With the bright cardinal in your hair,
Who sleeps and sings?

Stars are heavier, less graceful, than dreams,
And five fingers are enough
To capture and keep the prettiest things.
_____