Category Archives: Emily Every Day

What are the chances?  I chose a poem yesterday by flipping randomly through the pages of my book.  Didn’t like what I came up with so waited a day and tried again.  Random flipping, random flipping, and asking:  “Emily, what do you want to tell me today?”  Yep, the same poem came to hand again.  She is relentless, this woman.  Here it is:

#586, c. 1862

We talked as Girls do —
Fond, and late —
We speculated fair, on every subject, but the Grave —
Of ours, none affair —

We handled Destinies, as cool —
As we — Disposers — be —
And God, a Quiet Party
To our Authority —

But fondest, dwelt upon Ourself
As we eventual — be —
When Girls to Women, softly raised
We — occupy — Degree —

 We parted with a contract
To cherish, and to write
But Heaven made both, impossible
Before another night.

 When Emily writes, “We talked as Girls do” she means something more than a frank discussion of our favorite shoes.  She points to the innocent arrogance of young, smart girls.  We think we are in charge of our lives, while God listens silently.  Makes me think of the proverb, “Man proposes. God disposes.”  Except that here Emily claims the power of the disposer.  God is the silent partner.  He quietly dispatches while we girls, with the folly of youth, plan our futures as we grow to be the women we imagine.

The promise to cherish and to write is also awfully girlish.  Something happens in the lives of young girls, their relationships to each other, their awareness of their ability to create with their words and their love, that makes them feel wondrous and powerful.  And Em here dwells on the cruelty of denying that.

The part that moves me most deeply is, “talk as Girls do”.  The phrase assumes so much, as if Girls are a well known, well studied and documented species.  That one can consolidate their discourse to a shorthand.  You know how girls are.  How they do go on.

What pains me is the truth of this assumption.  I recognize it immediately.  Emily honors the innocent arrogance of girls, not merely their youth but their gender as well.  Girls, in Em’s view, have a special fondness for this feeling of direction and creativity over their own destiny.  A direction born out of an ability to imagine and articulate the future.  These girls “speculate fair”.  There is no ground they can’t traverse within the fruitful fields of their imaginative conversation.  And that’s the center of it right there—the magic for girls is in the sharing of the ideas.

The other thing that girls do like nobody’s business is make promises to cherish each other.  And to write!  Absolutely one must write!  Girls have to communicate or they don’t exist.  (Cell phones were devised with girls in mind.)  Writing, speaking, sharing, cherishing—all this is how girls stay alive.  Transferring information.  Constantly.

And when girls make a promise to cherish each other and remain connected through words, it’s a promise for real and for good.  I am remembering my best friend from childhood, Helene.  I usually went away during the summers, and we wrote pages and pages of letters to each other. Helene signed her letters, “friend always.”  She is the only person in the world for whom those words actually mean what they say.  Helene is still my friend.  She will not let me go, no matter how much time or distance there is between us.  She wrote “friend always” about 35 years ago.  And she has made good on that promise.

In Emily’s poem nothing could put a stop to the promise made between these two girls but the will of Heaven itself.  Only God, the eavesdropper, who silently allows the girls to go on about their imaginary authority over their own lives, can put a stop to it.  And He does.  Without a word.  He takes Emily’s friend away without an explanation.  He doesn’t have to explain.  He’s God.

Emily’s tone here is indulgent toward girls and their belief in themselves, but she is not patronizing.  She believes in their talk and their promises.  She also sounds angry.  It’s not fair to give girls all that power to imagine and speak, and then take it all away.  Not fair at all.  Downright mean, in fact.

Another proverb comes to mind:  “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”  I have always thought this was a gentle reminder to be humble in the face of time and change.  Now I hear it more as a cruel joke.

I chose today’s poem at random, as usual, and then immediately tried to get another one.  I just didn’t want to think about the first line: “Grief is a Mouse.” I didn’t want to sit here and think about the many forms that grief takes.  My head hurts, my ankle hurts, and I realize that I cannot sneak around the Rules of Random Chance once I put that Genius in charge.  If this is the poem that Chance has put in my hand, then this will have to be the thing I work with today.

Here it is:  #793, c. 1863

Grief is a Mouse —
And chooses the Wainscot in the Breast
For His Shy House —
And baffles quest—

Grief is a Thief — quick startled —
Pricks His Ear — report to hear
Of that Vast Dark —
That swept His Being — back—

Grief is a Juggler — boldest at the Play —
Lest if He flinch — the eye that way
Pounce on His Bruises — One — say — or Three —
Grief is a Gourmand — spare His luxury —

Best Grief is Tongueless — before He’ll tell —
Burn Him in the Public Square —
His Ashes — will
Possibly — if they refuse — How then know —
Since a Rack couldn’t coax a syllable — now.

Emily tells me that grief snuggles down into my breast, cozy and warm, and eludes capture because it is so well hidden in the last place I would look for it—my heart.

Then grief is a thief, sneaky, furtive, taking life.  A criminal yes, but nothing in the face of that Vast Dark.  What is the thing that is more powerful than mere grief?  Despair!  Grief is dynamic, small.  Despair is boundless, implacable.  Grief juggles, light, moving this way and that, skips before my eyes.  When I think I’ve dodged grief, it is there again keeping all the balls in the air.  Keeping this experience moving, awake and in the air.  Always moving to stay current, relevant.  Grief never rests.  It is lively.

And Grief is a gourmand, who dines on me, always happy to be at my table.  It’s always a good time to chew on my peace.  Never let it be said that grief has no appetite for making a meal of the time before me.  It is all eaten up by Grief, that greedy dinner guest.

Best grief is tongueless, silent, won’t give up his secrets.  You can torture him on the rack and burn him at the stake.  Even his ashes will not speak for him.  Grief will not give up his reason for being. Grief does not explain or apologize.  There is nothing to hear from grief, anyway.  It has nothing to offer by way of wisdom.  Nothing useful.  Nothing so pat as understanding.

Grief is the constant companion, changing form from time to time, hiding and then reappearing, causing mischief, making a pig of himself.  He never goes away completely and we don’t know why Grief accompanies us in all these forms because Grief isn’t talking.  It is the thing beside or behind that we step along or back into without any reason, or explanation or name.

The nameless, voiceless grief comes and sits close, a weight on the heart.  Not depression.  That is a big fat stupid guy who smothers.  Grief is a slim sharp fellow, who knows exactly where to point, which sore portion of the flesh to dig into.  There.  That is the place of loss, right there.  Grief articulates beautifully without sound.  Only a gesture.

Right there is where something died.  Right there is where the lost dead thing fell away as you tried to catch it with both hands.  Where the baby slipped through your fingers.  Where the face you loved, closed and turned away.  Where the breath stopped.

Then grief will point to that place.  Relentless.  Grief never goes away.

Grief is tongueless because there isn’t anything to say.  No comfort.  How hollow.  There is only knowing what is always there—that absence.  No words can fill the empty space where something cherished used to be.

I’m listening to “For Emma, Forever Ago” (Bon Iver).  Today’s poem is #756, c. 1863.  Emily is in a queer mood.  By request, I render it whole here:

One Blessing had I than the rest
So larger to my Eyes
That I stopped gauging — satisfied—
For this enchanted size —

It was the limit of my Dream —
The focus of my Prayer—
A perfect — paralyzing Bliss —
Contented as Despair —

I knew no more of Want — or Cold —
Phantasms both become
For this new Value in the  Soul —
Supremest Earthly Sum—

The Heaven  below the Heaven above —
Obscured with ruddier Blue —
Life’s Latitudes leant over — full—
The Judgement perished — too —

Why Bliss so scantily disburse —
Why Paradise defer —
Why Floods be served to Us — in Bowls —
I speculate no more.

This poem makes me ask what could I have that would make me happy to be miserable.  I have not felt that way in many long years.  So in love that even the pain of conflict with the loved one is a pleasure somehow.  To know such complete bliss that even the misery is perfect.  So rich in my soul that I am happy to embrace it all.

We are led to believe that if something is painful, or some association gives us pain, we must eradicate this from our lives.  Because if it hurts, it must be bad.  I’m not going to argue with that.  Certainly a lot of toxic events, people, etc should be avoided because these are only destructive for all concerned.

Now Emily’s poem makes me ask what does it mean to have that “perfect paralyzing Bliss/Contented as despair”?  This is the line that gives me pause.  My wrinkled old brain doesn’t want to get around this.  But I have to take another pass at it.

This is the Blessing she says.  Not a joy, not a pleasure, but a blessing that surpasses all other blessings and is the limit of her dream, the focus of her prayer.  Also I note this blessing is not so simple as to know God’s love or a promise of heaven after.  For this blessing is “Heaven below” here on earth and obscures “Heaven above.”  The earthly blessing is greater than what God offers in the afterlife.

It is that opening of the soul, the depth and richness in her soul that allows for all that earthly existence may provide.  The paradox of the Bliss that leaves one paralyzed or a Despair that is contentment.  This is not masochism.  This is the complexity of being human.  Well, the complexity of being Emily.  To hold all that is possible in her soul at once without judgement or fear or anxious effort to replace, renew, retreat.  Simple being.

The second to last line:  “Why Floods be served to Us — in Bowls — I speculate no more.”  Have to admit this really strikes a chord in my New Orleans heart.  Em says, Do not sit and ask “Why?”  There is no answer to the question,”Why did Katrina fill up the bowl of our city with water?”  That question itself of “Why?” (and lack of an answer) breeds the misery, not the flood water.  The water drained out of the bowl a long time ago.  If we are still asking “why?” then we can’t blame Katrina or the federal government for our despair.  It is our own poor question.  There is no why.  There is only the complexity of holding all that we are at once without desire or judgment. Only contentment for what we are.

I woke from this dream early in the morning:  I am swimming in the ocean with my daughter.  (I don’t have an actual daughter; this was my dream daughter.) We rise and fall in the enormous, green cloudy swells of water.  I teach my daughter how to discipline the ocean so it will not overwhelm her.  We make a game of it.  We slap the surface of the water and shout, “Take that you great, big, brave, old ocean!”