Seeing Emily's Dickinson's bedroom, preserved as it was at her death, and the dresser where all her poems were found, was an almost overwhelming experience. I was so overcome, I almost fainted. Here is a revision of the poem I wrote about the visit. My first draft had some sentence fragments -- they were OK but I would rather be grammatically correct. I was also reminded of the visit to the Dickinson home by Abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and this led me to add some imagery about the poems being confined in a dark close place like slaves in a slave-ship -- sudden after-the-fact inspiration. The poem is a little longer, but it also more clear, this and that, here and there, poems versus table versus dresser -- the first draft was looser but did not actually make sense as a description. Some say "First-thought best-thought" but I don't think so. So here it is:
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unread, not to be read, not to be published,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.
Right there, feet from the bed she died in,
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not to be read, not to be published,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 speak to,
ever, except from behind a door, ajar.
How they came from her writing table there
(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.”
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.
