Monthly Archives: June 2009

Today we have no dashes but a trenchant offering on life brushing up against everlasting Life.

# 1205, c. 1872

Immortal is an ample word
When what we need is by
But when it leaves us for a time
‘Tis a necessity.

Of Heaven above the firmest proof
We fundamental know
Except for its marauding Hand
It had been Heaven below.

In her own gentle way Emily sounds almost angry, certainly piqued.  As though she believes she’s been cheated.  Here’s what I mean:  Faith is easy and theoretical in the beginning of life and this poem, when we have everything we need.  We feel no lack, therefore, “immortal” is not only “ample” but also a “word”.  Not an experience.  It is something written or talked about.  Not felt like the “Hand” that comes in the second stanza.  Easy enough to stay in the head with this concept.

I am fascinated that the poem takes a sense of the divine from words to flesh. Em feels this “marauding Hand” in her experience, taking away the things that she needs.  People she loves perhaps, or her own health and strength.  I suspect the latter since these things are taken “for a time”.  She might get it back, but while it’s gone, the absence of what she needs forces her to consider the “immortal”, her own passage into death.

This poem strikes me as more grim than bitter.  I do not hear her as self-pitying or bemoaning her loss.  Rather I hear Emily giving a brutal assessment of the role of faith in the common life of the body.  The life we live here on earth, where our feet touch the ground and we expect to get up and move without pain.  And we  hold that one we want.  To summon Mary Oliver, “to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

This is Heaven for Emily, to feel with her own “Hand” that solid, palpable, warm experience of need fulfilled.  Not an idea or a word but a lived sense of completion.  And she sounds a little pissed off at Heaven for removing this and making pain the lever that causes her to look into Heaven.

Bless her soul.  A woman of nearly infinite words deploys her greatest gift toward wrestling this paradox onto the page.  I admire Emily’s delicacy in this struggle, and her acceptance of the frustration.  She finds her poem at the center of that knot:  We are asked to believe in certain things, such as the existence of an immortal soul.  But don’t even begin to understand this idea until we are devastated by some loss.  Even then we only stand at the edge of understanding because the next step into knowing goes far beyond the grasp of words.  There we remain in confusion and frustration until, well . . . I don’t know.  Until the next shock pushes us over the line.

I want to close with a story.  I walked Lance this morning without the benefit of this giant plastic walking boot that the doctor has made me wear while my broken ankle heals.  It is still technically fractured, but it has gotten strong enough that he wants me to start walking unassisted to regain what I’ve lost over the past month of being more or less immobilized.  

I also want to report that I have a darling orthopedist.  I call him Dr. Charming. The first time I saw him he gave me strict orders not to drive my car (since my right ankle is the broken one).  He also gave me a list of other things I’m not allowed to do.  Then he closed by saying, “Your ankle will heal . . . if you cooperate.”

When I saw him again four weeks later, he asked,   “Have you been cheating?” I confessed that I had taught myself to drive a car with my left foot.  I had grown tired of being cooped up in the house and tired of waiting for people to come get me.

Dr. Charming put his fingers in his ears and hummed.  “I didn’t hear that,” he said.  Then he removed his fingers from his ears.  “Have you finished telling me about the illegal and dangerous things you have done?”

How did I get the adorable orthopedist?  There aren’t many of these.

The good news is I’m walking again, slowly with a limp and still some pain if I step one hair out of line.  But I’m doing it, by God and I’ll keep doing it because I’m on the verge of exploding with frustration if I don’t get my mobility back soon.  

This makes me think about an expression I learned at the first magazine I wrote for years ago.  When a story really comes together, when you know you’ve got it—a story with life, juice, muscle, heft.  When you’ve done the work, and your story has achieved sufficient meaning that people would get something from reading it.  That’s when the editor looks at it and says, “Yeah, that story has legs.”  It’s ready to run.

My setback is nothing compared to what some people, including my darling Emily, have gone through.  Yet, it has forced me to sit still and experience my body as not capable of serving me in all the ways I have come to enjoy and expect.  I am spoiled.  Filled with rude health, liberty and strength that I take for granted.  

This hairline fracture, although a minor health challenge, has caused pain and frustration.  More important, it’s the reason I’m sitting here on the porch with Emily, where I get to discuss things with  her that normally I would not give my time to considering.  So I have my right ankle, slightly damaged, to thank for deepening my relationship to Emily and her poems and my own experiences.

As well, now I know this much is true:  They’re going to have to cut the legs out from under me before this is over.  I’m ready to run.

Today Emily considers feminine beauty.  Not a bad topic for our little brown mouse.  Here it is:  #558  “But little Carmine hath her face—”  Okay, whoever the poem addresses, this woman does not add color to her face.  Carmine is a  dye, not a blush produced by good health or sunshine or emotional heat.

Next:  “Of Emerald scant—her Gown—”  The woman Em refers to also does not play dress-up either, nor decorate herself with gems.  I’m getting suspicious and nervous here.  I love Carmine and Emeralds.  I have many shades of Carmine at my disposal and trade them out regularly.  Gewgaws are my life.  Not to mention feathers, velvet, pointy-toed sandals.  Emily please don’t make me feel shallow and guilty for loving the girly dress-up stuff.  I want you to respect me, really I do.  But c’mon.  If you lived in my century I know we could be friends, drink iced-coffee and talk about our favorite shoes.

There’s more:  

“Her beauty — is the love she doth —

Itself — exhibit — Mine —”

That little turn at the end intrigues me, the change from the third person to the first person.  It makes me think of two possibilities.  The first is that she speaks to a beloved friend, a woman who is either her lover in the sexual sense or a cherished friend of her heart.  Either works.  There is some hint around town that Emily may have been a lesbian.  That’s possible.  Or this love directed to a woman may be that 19th century style of discourse that close women friends saved for each other.  I can well imagine that in a culture and a time that so denied (proper) women the liberty to express their emotional and sexual passions for men either in word or deed, that passion would would have to erupt out of some other (more chaste and “safe”) outlet.  To her female friends.

I don’t have to tell you that you can’t plug up a woman’s emotions.  They’ll just come out her ears or eyeballs or something we can’t even imagine right now.

Women need to love in the way that a dog needs to rub his head on your shins.  I now that sounds awfully sexist, what I just wrote.  Too bad.  It’s true.  Women need to lavish their love on someone.  That impulse will flow into whatever channel that permits an opening.  That love will go wherever it is welcomed.

The second thought that surfaced is that this poem may be the poet’s consideration of her own image in the mirror.  I can imagine Emily seeing herself as outwardly plain and talking about herself in the third person when discussing her lack of paint and adornment.  But then, oh but then, Em can see in her own face that love illuminates her from within and gives her a beauty that even she, modest Em, must recognize.  A beauty that cannot be washed away with soap and water or discarded onto the dressing table.

Here is another sexist observation that I feel compelled to make about women in general and myself in particular.  Love does make us beautiful.   Bleecchhh . . .  Sorry.  There it is.  I can’t take it back now.  It’s true, and it makes me a little ill to know how true this is.  But I can see it in my own face.  When I love, I am lovely.

When I have lost that love, I can’t stand to look at myself.  I can see the shift, the sag, the lines, the dark circles, the droop.  

I hate that my face is such an automatic and vivid barometer of my emotional state.  I’ll never be able to hide anything.  If I had a tail, it would wag.  I am only exposed.  Only vulnerable.  Arrrghhh.

I’ll never win at poker.

I’ll always be the one left hanging in the empty space between me and the other.  The one with the better poker face.

I’ve gotten advice from a friend about how to write this blog.  First she said she wanted me to reproduce verbatim each poem, as I work with it.  Then she said, “Nah, don’t bother.  Too academic.”  I agreed with her both times. 

I’m typing in today’s poem in its complete form because I find it particularly challenging.

#1135, c. 1868

Too cold is this
To warm with Sun—
Too stiff to bended be,
To joint this Agate were a work—
Outstaring Masonry—

How went the Agile Kernal out
Contusion of the Husk
Nor rip, nor wrinkle indicate
But just an Asterisk.

Today my attention is drawn to the last word.  She drifts through a couple of images starting with marble and stone masonry.  Then to a kernel coming out of its husk.  Ending with an Asterisk.  That symbol in typeface to show what’s missing.  She moves from these hard-surfaced natural items, stone and nut, to the realm of writing, ideas and symbols.  Actual symbols, not literary ones.

As asterisk symbolizes some words that are missing that we should look for elsewhere—in a footnote, for example.  As a placeholder in the text, the asterisk is a symbol embedded in symbols.  A symbol that symbolizes more symbols.  Printed words are a lot of marks that symbolize things or ideas.  The asterisk’s distance from physical reality is compounded by its function, its reason for existing in the first place.

Ok, now I’ll go lofting on my own trip because that’s what I’m here for.  I use asterisks when I am editing a manuscript, and I want the student to know I especially like something in the story.  For me the asterisk is a nice, dense, compressed item that seems to bristle with excitement.  That’s why I chose it to symbolize my approval and enjoyment of someone’s writing.

And it works well for that.  These penciled asterisks look merry and bright scattered up and down the margins of a manuscript.  I’d be happy to have a manuscript of mine returned to me, decorated with lots of hand-made asterisks.  It’s one of the more fun punctuation marks.  I like it so much better than exclamation points.  Those seem overbearing.  An asterisk is an elegant, radiating expression of good will.

I wonder if that’s what Emily had in mind.  I doubt it.  I’m sure she was onto something else altogether, having to do with the brute act of drawing forth the seed of thought.  From Agate to Kernel.  What is she up to?  What is hard, cold and immovable in her?  That puts her in mind of some lively seed that somehow makes its way into the world without any obvious violence?

Is it those ideas, those words that are missing?  Suggested only by the symbol in the typeface.  What we can’t see.  Her unspoken thoughts.  Her unwritten words.  That are waiting to be fertilized and grow.

Dear Emily, what on Earth are you up to, my girl?  You leave me interestingly challenged and drawn into your knotty, gnomic pronouncements.