Jacqueline Osherow
Calling
Emily
Dickinson to Come, as Guide, Out West
Certainly, you're a strange choice for a guide,
A painfully timid woman who's been nowhere,
Rarely, for years at least, even outside.
But there are things I want to know about the air
And by all accounts you and she were intimate;
She'd slip in late at night to braid your hair
And with every twisted strand divulge a secret.
Perhaps it was her rendezvous with thunder
That urged you into your one wild night.
Who knows how far afield she helped you wander?
Perhaps she introduced the sea, the moor,
The way the heather's reckless bells meander
To the brinks of cliffs to ring the waves ashore .
Perhaps she even learned to mimic their chime
Or brought a tiny perfumed souvenir
Right through the opened window to your room.
After that you never wanted to leave.
I should like a grand tour of that room:
The tricks of swallows orbiting the eave,
The most elaborate ceiling cracks and floorboards,
The piles and piles of poems you didn't save
But distributed, instead, among the birds
Who promised to pass them on to flies and bees.
In those, perhaps, you didn't stoop to words.
They were pure reverie, like your prairies.
You'd show those too, if the tour were thorough
And pens cut from the feathers of passing geese,
Each an instantaneous perfect arrow
That would overwhelm its mark at breakneck speed
And, without harming a bone, pluck its marrow.
