Monthly Archives: June 2009

Uncanny how she does this.  Today I have been sitting here, marveling at the sudden surge in bird life around my porch.  The starlings are going nuts because a blue jay has invaded the space.  God knows what he’s doing here, but they want him out.  Nobody is playing nice in my trees this morning.

Lance is outraged.  He paces up and down the porch and attempts to bring rapprochement to this war by adding his voice to the fray.  No one pays attention to him.  I suspect that they do not take him seriously.

Then I read Emily’s next poem.  It begins: “I have a Bird in spring/ Which for myself doth sing—”  Again this is a discussion of loss and her acceptance that this brief physical life is not the only one.  Today Emily is missing others who are gone.  “though they now depart,/ Tell I my doubting heart/ They’re thine.”

Here’s my favorite:

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

For one thing, I love that she doesn’t even try to rhyme “see” and “removed”.  She does this throughout.  Among all these lovely perfect rhymes she’ll drop a complete clunker.  Not even a slant rhyme.  Such defiance!  The turd in the punch bowl.

Or the alternating shocks in  an ordinary lifetime.  The painful pause when we know something has gone wrong. Of course this causes one doubt.  How can any of this so-called life be worthwhile if it hurts so much?  Emily draws the reader back into her rhyme and rhythm.  Find the next beat in the music, she asks.  pain/pleasure    harmony/discord    fight/ peace     flight/return

Today feels like a pause between two beats of music.  As if I am holding my breath, waiting for the music to carry my foot into the next step of the dance.  It is an interval between discord and harmony, where I hang in nothingness.  No movement.  A portion of time where anything is possible.

For now I’ll stick to the original plan which was to read the poems in chronological order.  The purpose being to use the poems simply as a launch into spontaneous writing.  So I’ll take each poem and respond as I do to each morning, each moment, each thunder clap, each season, each love.

Today gives us a glorious pouring down rain, rattling the leaves of the banana trees.  Lance and I got caught in the downpour on our walk.  Good thing I remembered my sunglasses.  We were both soaked by the time we got back home.  That’s okay.  I’ve been told that I am not made of sugar, and I won’t melt.  For whatever that’s worth.

#4, 1853  Emily and her “Pilot” proceed.

On this wondrous sea
Sailing silently,
Ho! Pilot, ho!

Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar —
Where the storm is o’er?

In the peaceful west
Many the sails at rest —
The anchors fast —
Thither I pilot thee —
Land Ho! Eternity!
Ashore at last!

She’s asking a lot of questions of her pilot.  Who’s in charge?  In the end of this short poem, Emily has taken the wheel of the vessel and announces that she will pilot it to “Eternity”.  

“Ashore at last!”

I like that shift when she/poet takes control.  I hear her claiming authority over her own spiritual life.  She knows where she is going.  Who is this other Pilot?  A minister?  The clergy guiding our vessels across the sea?  Emily pilots her own ship, her own body and soul toward the shore “where no breakers roar.”  Moving on her own toward silence.

Funny that.  The writer’s ultimate destination is silence.  All these words, thousands, maybe millions, stones in a path toward infinite silence.  She’s looking for that, anticipating it.  There is peace and rest in that silence.  And I must wonder at the temperament of a woman who devotes nearly every minute of her life to the crafty consignment of words to paper, who also knows at this young age (she was 22 years old when she wrote this poem) that the long arc of her busy, wordy life would lead to silence.  And that she looks to that with some pleasure—it sounds like.  I imagine her/me/all of us as chattering magpies, saying as much as possible before someone puts out the lights.

For what, for what?  Well, in Em’s case: The purpose was to provide something for me to read here on my porch, while Lance yarfs and snorfles at the squirrels.  Something to read. A hook to hang my thoughts on.

Thank you, Emily.

This morning Emily offers another Valentine poem, dated 1852.  She’s in a more playful mood, pitting herself and the mysteries of the moon and the stars against the “Hill of Science.”  My favorite lines: “It was brave Columbus/ A sailing o’er the tide/ Who notified the nation/ Of where I would reside!”

I can’t help but experience her tone as a little snotty here.  Suggesting that the men who think they “discover” the planet are deluded.  It was there all the time!  The “notified”, the italicized was, the cute exclamation point at the end.  I hear it again in the line:  “Three cheers, sir,  for the gentleman/ Who first observed the moon!”

She is having sport with crusty old Columbus and all that he represents.  The folly of men who think they know the score, who think they’re in charge of the planet and everyone on it.

She concludes with a vision of her own body reduced to ashes.  Trust Em to start cute and end deadly.  In this same stanza she bids farewell to some unnamed “Sir”, a friend.

The moon is still here.  Emily and Columbus are long gone.  That was her point, I guess. The ridiculousness of thinking our lives or our “discoveries” have any impact at all on this great chunk of rock we cling to for our little bit of time.  

This was her idea of a Valentine poem.  I worry about Emily sometimes. Is she happy, I wonder?  Does she have friends?  Or even go out?  Why the morbid thoughts?

I am rearranging the furniture in my head around this project:  The Emily Every Day Project.  Now, I’m thinking I’ll not take these in chronological order, but skip to the meat of the book.  Her most productive year was 1862, a hundred years before my birth.  Maybe I’ll go straight there and skip the juvenilia.  I like it, but I know the juicy stuff comes later, much later.  It will take me years to get to it at this rate.

I am impatient.  Come to think of it, my impatience is the whole reason I wanted to create a meditation practice for myself in the first place.  See, now I am already disrupting the process, changing it to suit my accelerated metabolism. 

Then again this is my project.

I can do whatever I want.  I’m a grown-up.