When I was a child, I’d often read poems I didn’t understand. I’d throw my thoughts against the poem like a locked box, trying to parse the words together, so that the lock would slip open.
There were poets whom I knew were mostly beyond me, but my mind rubbed against them systematically, like my cat rubs her face against a hairbrush, and there were others whose work was made mostly of sound rather than idea, and those I could drink up like a glass of water. Emily Dickinson was in the first category, and Theodore Roethke in the latter.
I wasn’t a fan of Dickinson. Why should I be? A West Coast child who had no use for a version of nature that focused on the fly, the snake, and a bunch of east coast birds. Dickinson’s world was lacy, with holes. Her snakes all seemed to be wearing little Preacher’s suits. Not enough sex in it, I might have said, had I been anything but a child.
But then I stumbled on two short Dickinson poems of nonconformity.
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This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me
I was an oddball kind of child. Not fitting in was kind of my philosophy.
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I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one's name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog! |
At last, a code I could use, a message I needed!
Later, I returned to Dickinson, and we sat together in the window where she whispered to me. I was grown by then. She’s not in my body as a form of sound. She’s in my mind, deep down there, like a series of locks. I open one, and she opens another. And in this infinitely regressive chain, she and I travel through a lonely place together.
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