Some Dickinson Stuff

An Alumna of the Mt. Holyoke
Female Seminary Meets a Townsman
--Boston Common 1853
I encountered a man from Amherst
And inquired, "How's dear Em?"
He lowered his eyes, gave a cough,
And started out, "Ahem..."

"Well, ma'am, it's a hard thing to report,
But we in the Town all fear
That Emily's going--" he touched his head--
"A little strange up here."

"Oh, no!" I cried, and then, "How so?
Whatever can you mean?
When I left, she was the sanest girl
The Town had ever seen!"

"Oh, that she was," the man agreed,
"But lately, I'm afraid,
She stays upstairs in her little room
Behind a pulled-down shade."

"What of it, sir?" I cried again,
"That doesn't make her mad!"
And then the Amherst man went on,
"Now brace yourself--it's bad--

The news that you have wrung from me--
I fear that it gets worse--"
Then he leaned and whispered in my ear,
"She's taken to writing Verse."

I staggered back in utter shock:
I knew it was the end--
Writing Verse is a certain sign
One's gone around the bend.

Oh, I wept all night for my sweet Em--
That angel bright and pure--
For having fallen victim to The Verse,
The Disease that has no Cure.

Electronic Emily
Out upon--the World
She gazed from--Upper Room
Recluse--and all in White
Her eye--a Camera Zoom

Not to mention--how
Her Ear--that Microphone
Picked up--from Miles off
The way--that Flowers groan

God made--in Amherst
The first--of VCR's
A faithful--Taper of
Light--from faroff Stars

In Amherst, Once...
A little girl was startled by a snake
Passing her foot in the grass.
This caused a constriction in her body,
A puckering of her ass.

She grew up to be a poet,
Writing all artfully alone,
And changed the true location
To an even truer bone.

Autre Temps, Autre Moeurs
Just as you might, for a treat,
Drive your kids down to the seashore
To enjoy the waves,

The Dickinsons would sometimes
Ride Emily out to the edge of town
To enjoy the graves.

Emily at the Plate
From its Mound--the World hurls
To wait at Home--takes Nerve
Many--can hit--the Fast Ball
But ah--so few--the Curve


Conversation
"Vesuvius dont talk--Etna--dont..."
--Emily Dickinson in a "Master" letter
"Okay, Em. We won't"
The mountains replied
And kept, mostly, like her,
Their lava inside.

Miss Lonelyhearts' Revenge
An obscure Miss E. Dickinson
Once wrote off for advice from
One of Boston's leading sages.

In Bartlett's book he owns one line
While she alone holds title to
Five double-columned pages.

Tabloid Retraction
"When Emily Dickinson praised poetry
that made her 'feel physically as if the top
of my head were taken off,' she was calling
for deeper endorphin payloads"
--Brad Leithhauser, "The Confinement of Free Verse"
Miss Dickinson, interviewed
While weeding her small hyphen-
ated garden on the lower slope
Of Mt. Parnassus, Massachusetts,
Denied ever using or even condoning the use
Of endorphins at any time or in any mode.

"Much less," she added, in her
Characteristic Upper Case voice,
"Would I ever, ever--Employ
So ugly a word as Pay-load."

Editorial Board Meeting
"[Houghton Mifflin] thought that Higginson
must be losing his mind to recommend such stuff
[the poems of Emily Dickinson].
Higginson has snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.
We do not mean to be unkind,
But Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
Her stuff is raw and unrefined--
As cracked as the Liberty Bell.
Yes, Higginson's snapped. He's lost his mind.
This old maid's book will never sell.

Amherst Power & Light
When I back up my verse on floppy disks,
As the hard drive is going around,
I think of Emily sewing up her poems
In little packets to be found.

How truly blest was she, dear Emily--
She of the artful, telling dash--
Never in all her life had she to fear
A computer's sudden crash.

Policy
"We do not publish poetry...."
--"Guidelines for Contributors"
The Emily Dickinson Journal
We do not publish poetry? That's true.
Prose is the medium we employ.
What Emily did, we do not do.
We do not publish poetry. It's true.
We have no space for verse that's new.
Our journal's a tool and not a toy.
We do not publish poetry? Quite true.
Prose is the medium we employ.

Ceremony at West Cemetery
Who bore Emily's body to her grave,
Soul already with the Lord?
Kelley and Moynihan and Sullivan,
Cashman, Scannell, and Ward.

The pallbearers, a bunch of Paddies
Who worked on her father's grounds,
Were of the Select Society
Who boxed her Out of Bounds.

Her feathery body, worn by beating
Against the Cage of God,
Rode the shoulders of six Irish Micks
To be covered with New Sod.

Famine-hardened, they did not weep
At the World's and Amherst's loss,
But, shovels down, I see them all
Making the Sign of the Cross.

Assimilation
I know a native Southerner
Who's lived too long in New York.
So apostate has he become,
He eats fried chicken with a fork.


At Second and Arch...
The Widow Ross had an upholstery shop
And there she sewed some flags,
Spangled with five-pointed stars
That she made from petticoat rags.

Historians deny she was the first
To make the banner with needled thread.
Despite all the debunking critics, though,
Betsy lives in the American head.

As the Italians say, "If it's not true,
It remains a well-made story,"
Better in fact than Captain Driver's
And the relic called Old Glory.


Brief Winter Storm, Atlanta
In the evening the snow descends.
The streets are hushed.
In the morning, the sun ascends.
The streets are slushed.


Clerihew: Astaire II
Fred Astaire
Epitomized savoir-faire.
Onscreen he never did anything gauche,
Not even with Nina Foch.


Fame
Some poets achieve success in this life.
Others must wait for Posterity's rewards.
Edgar Guest owned a Cadillac.
The rest?  Banged-up Fords.