Category Archives: Emily Every Day

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.

I had to skip a day and start over because the poem yesterday threw me into a whirl of misunderstanding.  I needed to dwell on it a while longer and try again today.  It’s painful.

#1299, c. 1874

Delight’s Despair at setting
Is that Delight is less
Than the sufficing Longing
That so impoverish.

Enchantment’s Perihelion
Mistaken oft has been
For the Authentic orbit
Of its Anterior Sun.

Yes, Emily you are correct.  The actual fulfillment of longing or desire is never what one hopes.  The anticipation, because it is all in the vapors of the mind, grows beyond  any physical possibility.  The tendency to focus on those vapors is a kind of addiction that may “impoverish”.  By that she means this misdirected obsessive focus drains the life out of your Life.  Em is saying: Don’t mistake your desire for the thing itself that you desire.  Desiring only the experience of desire will rob you of energy or life force.

In the next stanza, the one I love more, we reach “Enchantment’s Perihelion.”  Beautiful.  Her metaphor of the sun here is lovely and a perfect counterweight to my moon visit two nights ago.  The thought that rises up is a warning:  You will miss the true experience, the great source of all life, heat, energy, if you mistake “enchantment” for the force that produces it.  It takes courage to let go of enchantment because it is so delightful, or seems so at least.  Clearly enchantment is not all there is.  

Preferring enchantment over real connection to life is like taking in the fragrance of a freshly baked loaf of bread and thinking you have been sufficiently fed—while the bread itself goes stale and uneaten.  This homely loaf is not nearly as glamourous as that glorious fragrance that fills all the air at once, swirls around you, takes control, entices you into the kitchen.  This actual loaf of bread, if you were willing to take it and eat it, would sustain your body and give you strength in a real and lived way.  Yet, the loaf itself does not produce nearly the excitement sparked by its heraldic scent.

So why would anyone prefer the enchantment over the true source of energy and life?  Well, because it’s there.  Enchantment is charming.  It comes to you.  You don’t have to look for it.  Then it sweeps over you without effort.  It’s easy to think that is enough.  The real source takes more active engagement.  Perhaps also, the real source of life is too much.  Too consuming.  Continuing the theme of the Sun, to contact the real source of life that throws this enchantment over us, would mean being burned up in the fire, melted and absorbed into that enormous power.  Loss of boundaries.  Loss of identity.  Loss of control.  

In any event, the sun (or God or the Beloved or who or what you want to slot into the role of life’s source) is too bright  for our frail, limited, human eyes to see directly.  We can only apprehend it by looking at the perihelion.  Emily tells us not to get confused about what you’re looking at, really

Emily also offers us a lesson in love and relationship.  Come down out of the ether of enchantment and partake of the real sustenance.  Don’t mistake the diverting perihelion of desire for the sun/source of love itself.

Emily is probably offering a lesson in lots of things.  Her metaphors are so dense, they travel well and can support just about any structure we build on them.

This poem continues to give me a pain in my chest.  I don’t know where this feeling comes from.  I could blame the poem, but honestly I don’t mind the pain.  It is settling, and I am arranging myself around it.  

Now, I am holding it like a flower.

Today I am invoking my privilege as Creator and changing the rules.  Rather than meditate on yet another poem about death, I have deployed the Genius of Random Chance.  I opened the book at random and chose the first poem that my eyes settled on.  I got a good one, good for this Strawberry full moon.

According to my research it was the Algonquin people who decided to call the first full moon in June the Strawberry Moon.  Ever since, white people have stuck with it and it’s considered fact by the Farmer’s Almanac.  It makes sense that the Algonquin would call it that.  Our strawberry season, this far south in Louisiana is nearly done.  Too hot.  In the region where the Algonquin lived, the strawberries would still be coming in around this time of year.

Here’s what Emily has to say today:

#334, c. 1862

All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this—
Syllables of Velvet—
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee—
Play it were a Humming Bird—
And just sipped—me—

Oh, my.  The poet is a flower.  Her poem a hungry humming bird, bringing sweet nectar to another.  Who?  Who cares.  After some little meditation on these lines, I’m a little twitter-pated.

Is it me, or is it hot in here?