Called Back
Before she crossed the quarter mile between the homestead & town
cemetery, Emily Dickinson helped plan her own funeral. “Everything
was white,” one biography reports: white ribbons & textile handles,
flannel for the lining (“five-sixths of a yard of Russian white”) plus the
robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed & in which the poet would
be buried. According to further description, we should add the
circumference of the flower garden to the distance traveled by the
funeral party, then a single pass through the great barn that kept the
family’s horses. I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while
spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter
when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry
past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve
been a field of buttercup, where some bystander surely caught sight of
six Irishmen (per Emily’s instruction) carrying the poet’s white casket.
- Michael Robins
[from The Bright Invisible (Saturnalia, 2022)]
Michael Robins is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently The Bright Invisible (2022) and People You May Know (2020), both from Saturnalia Books. He lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he teaches in the MFA program at McNeese State University and serves as editor of The McNeese Review.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Eighty): Michael Robins
Michael Robins’ eloquent and haunting tribute to Emily Dickinson hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, unjustified on the right in a way reminiscent of James Tate, whose poems seem to enjoy confounding the two. Its shape may suggest “postage stamp,” then “letter,” then “the poet’s room,” then “grave”—then, perhaps most aptly, “flower garden.” Robins’ poem begins in objectivity as he presents Dickinson’s funeral procession as a “crossing” detailed in advance by the poet herself:
. . .white ribbons & textile handles,
flannel for the lining [‘five-sixths of a yard of Russian white’] plus the
robe that Susan, her sister-in-law, designed. . .
How fitting that Emily’s color was and is white, an apparent absence embracing the spectrum.
A cheerful guidebook voice (“we should add”) reveals that the journey to the grave was not straightforward, but circled Dickinson’s flower garden and made “a single pass” through the barn holding the family horses, the procession a warmer, domesticated version of “I could not stop for Death” (poem 479). Notify the flowers, the horses, the barn flies that their Emily has turned toward eternity—this like the old custom of telling the bees, a charm of reconciliation between death and life.
Then things turn personal in the long rush of a single, passionate sentence:
. . . I’ve visited Emily’s grave more than any other & while
spring becomes summer in a snap, it was the beginning of the latter
when, late one night & a dozen sheets to the wind, I hoped to marry
past & present by launching my empty bottle toward what might’ve
been a field of buttercup . . .
The poem’s whiteness has become a hoped-for marriage of “past & present,” the warm snap between spring and summer the snap of taut sails as the poet, “sheets to the wind” (that metaphor that makes each drunk a boat) launches his messageless bottle “toward what might’ve / been a field of buttercup.” It is as if we are with the poet with Dickinson, when, in the cosmic expansiveness of her “wild nights,” she dreams of a “thee” to “moor in.”
As austere and intense as Emily herself, “Called Back” summons us, too, as Robins joins past and present in the sovereign apparition of her eccentrically ordained pallbearers: “six Irishmen.” * With them, we are privileged bystanders as time and eternity cross a small space into each other via the rectangle of a poem and the trim envelope of a casket.
– Angela Ball
*According to IrishCentral.com, Dickinson “shared her kitchen with an Irish maid [Margaret Maher] the last seventeen years of her life.” Scholar Aífe Murray is quoted as saying that Dickinson stored her poems in Maher’s trunk—'a trunk that had crossed the Atlantic’; and that after Dickinson died, Maher kept them safe.
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