Sweeping Emily Dickinson off Her Feet
What a strange potpourri of happiness and grief. What a blessing and a curse, the admixture of fame and obscurity. Cute pug-nosed longings and their devilish tricks. The frail dandy with his alligator shoes and Vitalis-slick hair. The raven-haired mistress who longs to be the wife with three children. The silver-tongued devil smooth talking his way past commitment. Everyone locked down in a small cell of confusion. Everyone protecting his own hunchbacked fear.
Give up the ghost and all else follows wrote Henry Miller, paraphrasing the Buddha. Spiral down thru enlightenment like a corkscrew and pour the red wine. This is my body, this is my blood, what else can I tell you? Myths gone lopsided, and here comes the unwanted tsunami. What you figure out you make up and that’s where the trouble starts.
I read today that Emily Dickinson wrote over seventeen hundred poems. There’s my girl! If I could rearrange time I’d sweep her off her feet in a maelstrom of Shards and consummate what even the least of us long for.