THE DRESSER IN EMILY'S BEDROOM
Right there, feet from the bed she died in,
were the poems, sewn up in tiny fascicle bundles,
unread, not to be read, not to be published,
monoprint chapbooks arranged and re-
arranged to suit intended readers
she was too reticent to address,
ever, except from behind a door, ajar.
They came from there, her writing table
(no bigger than a oiuja board),
from planchette pen to folded leaf
stitched shut and mummy-wrapped,
living and smothering just feet from where
a gasp and pen-dab and a foot-tap
telegraphed them into being.
How many enwrapped, entombed inside
that oblong, moth-proof drawer?
how many survivors of admonition
a poet should never ... a lady does not?
Eighteen hundred tightly-wound mortars
she wryly called her “little hymns,”
huddled like captives in a slave-hold,
sea-echoes lost in suffocated nautilus,
an unlit library with no borrowers —
how many silent nights did she browse there,
and turn the pages, and close them,
and push the drawer shut?
Emily Dickinson at Amherst,
I in your room as close to fainting
as ever in my adult existence,
at tear-burst, with a strangled cry I dare
not utter. A life, a life’s work,
a soul's compression that one executor
could have tossed away for kindling,
or suppressed for jealousy or malice.
But we have you, Emily, we have you always,
your words in a fascicle of stitched stars.
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