emily.

is it strange to love a girl who's been dead for a hundred years? maybe - probably - it's not even love. just some sorta fanciful attraction, a fantasy of a lyrical and poetic sort of love cooked up by the otherwise staid doctor-to-be in the creativity-stripped hospitals. maybe. but i do think i could love her. it's not anything i can explain, and everything about her poetry and her letters.

there's something so sheltered and imaginative about her. her letters are so polite. editors trashed her poetry as unconventional ...i'm losing my train of thought. it goes everywhere at once; there's so much i can say about this.

I know where Wells grow -
Droughtless Wells -

I think a little Well - like Mine -
Dearer to understand -

i saw this handwritten manuscript once. well, a copy, obviously. not terribly neat, but a fine hand. delicate. unbelievable - she'd created her own language. these curlicues and strange little signs, plus signs, it looked like. dots and slashes. walt whitman swaggers and boasts that he's something new, something previously untried and undone, freedom at its best! and then there's a girl in her attic who's rarely left her house, who knows the true meaning of freedom in a better, quieter, more personal way.

Of nearness to her sundered Things
The Soul has special times -
When Dimness - looks the Oddity -
Distinctness - easy seems -

she's just so polite. that's what gets me the most. she seems shy and quiet, so like a bird. self-deprecating in her letters to others. she referred to herself being a little ill, and i thought my heart would cave in from...tenderness? pity? a desire to shelter and protect?

i just can't believe the editors wrote her back telling her her poetry was crap. i can't think how must've made her feel, this girl locked away in her attic all her life, looking out at a world she didn't quite fit into, but understood better than most, writing about snakes and birds and death and waiting, and never quite about love. or am i wrong about that?

I shall forget the drop of Anguish
That scalds me now -

god! i just saw a page that lists facts supporting that she was a lesbian. jesus christ. what the hell is wrong with the world, that a woman who never really sought male company is immediately suspected a lesbian? the worst is how these people that write these things think of themselves as progressive and liberal, all the while furthering the old patriarchical supposition that a woman is made to breed with a man, and any woman who chooses another path is, of course, a lesbian. can't you people just leave her alone?

god, dammit!

....fume.

Now I lay thee down to Sleep -
I pray the Lord thy Dust to keep -
And if thou live before thou wake -
I pray the Lord thy Soul to make -

there's something slanted about her poetry, and i don't mean unnatural, dirty, wrong, whatever. i just mean - slanted. you have to think curved to get at the meaning, or get close to the meaning, as the case may be. you have to skew your perceptions a bit, even if you don't want you. just reading it, a line, any line, makes you think a little slanted.

what a quaint woman she must've been! and so polite, heh. i just can't get over that. there's something so fragile about her, as though she kept herself and most her poems locked away lest a stray breeze blew them all apart. i think i could've liked her, really loved her. i like to think i could've brought her out of her shell, but then again, maybe that would've just realigned her perceptions with the status quo. and then all her poetry would be lost.

I saw no Way -
The Heavens were stitched -
I felt the Columns close -
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres -
I touched the Universe -

i can't believe i'm writing this at 3:30am...

*****

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain,—
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem,—
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen,—
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

*****

And though thy sins be as scarlet,
They shall be white as snow;
Though they be red like crimson,
they shall be as wool.

Isaiah 1:18

*****

her name, in case it's not yet evident, is emily dickinson.