Bleaders,
I should just post a poem and get back to my backlog, but I miss you and wanted to chat. Oy, the backlog, huh? Gets to be a log on your back. Could be worse, at least it’s raining. It is raining on Brooklyn today, a white sky, wet bushes, and the metal drum of the AC become musical. I love things that are great. I love fake curses that sing to the tune of Well I’ll be a punky funk. I like the exclamation: Lisa Marie Presley. or Mar-zee-pan that’s good coffee.
But no dope, it is truly windy out, like the trees out Emily’s windows in one of her storms. When I visited last year, the guide showed us on the grounds that few of the trees of her time were still on the grounds, and then he put a hand up against the massive trunk behind him and said this one was here. I found it thrilling because I, like many of you, have been thrashed around by Dickinson’s tree branches in a storm, like furies after Orestes. And you know what they were mad about! Matricide isn’t just which edge of the bed you want to sleep on. Anyway, yeah.
So I just went looking for one of those poems with one of those storms in it, among Emily poems on line, but can’t find what I want. Now, mind, if I got up off my, uh, chair, and got any one of my Dickinson completes or selecteds, I’d have it in a hot mo. But we know, I think, by now, that this is not going to happen. Not because I am lazy but because of tangents. I go off on them.
Speaking of which, when I went to look for the poem I wanted to show you, because of the wind today, which has totally died down btw, I found the below Emily poem. And I’m all like, dude. She was a key figure for me in the history of religious and philosophical doubt that I wrote, but by the time I got to her the book was already big and I hadn’t yet gotten to Nietzsche. So I worked quick. Anyway, I don’t remember ever seeing this poem. I’m sorry the poem is kind of deathy, but I do think it is fun finding keen religious doubt in my most beloved poets.
Going to Heaven!
I don't know when --
Pray do not ask me how!
Indeed I'm too astonished
To think of answering you!
Going to Heaven!
How dim it sounds!
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home at night
Unto the Shepherd's arm!
Perhaps you're going too!
Who knows?
If you should get there first
Save just a little space for me
Close to the two I lost --
The smallest "Robe" will fit me
And just a bit of "Crown" --
For you know we do not mind our dress
When we are going home --
I'm glad I don't believe it
For it would stop my breath --
And I'd like to look a little more
At such a curious Earth!
I'm glad they did believe it
Whom I have never found
Since the mighty Autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.
Too heavy? Sorry. She’s so good. I have a poem I will offer as respite, not about death, but about everything else. Which, you know, implies death by its very absence, the negative space takes up death’s shape. But I’m just kidding. It’s about how I enjoy writing to you bleaders, even though it is in my book Funny which was published before I blegan blogging. Still Einstein does not seem to have been kidding that time is not at all what it seems. So, here is your poem. Lean your sweet ear over here.
Funny Ha Ha
Why this longing to speak? What good
could it do, to let you know that my
heart is a low note pressed from the bow
of a cello, like a church-bell, like a failing
of the sky; a failing to hold back thunder,
a pressure against the quiet?
That’s the ticket, cricket.
My magic sack of me, adorable self.
See you later, alligator.
You know the Borscht Belt time-zone
joke where if it’s eleven p.m. in New York
in Russia it’s 1947? That’s the sort of
category error I find myself up against
every day and it’s not amenable to explanation.
In a while, crocodile.
For some reason, whispering these secrets in your
ear has come to mean the world to me.
I have nuzzled in ersatz pastures and been wronged.
I have groaned on the prow of a boat and wanted.
That is why I turned to farm an Egypt of the arms.
Now we are free and drinking tea with milk and honey.
Say: Oh hell, pal o’ mine,
better get back to the grave.
Say: Looking for a rally in a 9th inning
groaner, driving pretty heavy toward the hoop.
Talent, footwork, charisma, he’s got it all.
I have waited half a fiscal year for the pleasure
of your garrulous arrangement and I feel now
quite effectively redeemed.
This ever happen to you before?
No. First time? Yes.
Jupiter Metal Heat was born far east of the stye of tranquility and hobbitually endangers species. Her books mentioned in this narrowcast are Debt: A Herstory, and Fanny: The End of the Tale. No I'm just being an idiot but i do kind of feel like it would be great to move merch as i am frikkin flying without a net so Doubt: A History and Funny . Say it with me: So get ye gon von Hugel, but with blessings on your head.
xoxJennifer
