Undressing a Maiden

Back again to Emily Dickinson who was the opposite of tame, the opposite of conventional.Our Emily, who would never use proper punctuation.How that shocked the literary bigwigs! No commas or semicolons for her! She favored the dash.This killingly beautiful poem by Billy Collins gets at her nature and the world she lived in too. You might have to be somewhat knowledgeable about her poems to recognize the fly buzzing and the plank and the loaded gun - she really did say Life was a loaded gun - but you don't have to know a single thing about all that to see the beauty and eroticism of this piece. And for you strictly 21st century readers, a tippet is a brief ornamental garment that hovers about the shoulders. Tulle is like organdy if that helps at all: stiff and somewhat gossamer in nature.  And whalebone stays were the joists in a corset that kept the whole edifice erect.I'll assume you know what a bonnet is and can visualize the ever-startling iceberg of human nakedness. Here is the poem then. Hold on tight!

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,easily lifted off her shoulders and laidon the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a morecomplicated matter with mother-of-pearlbuttons down the back,so tiny and numerous that it takes foreverbefore my hands can part the fabric,like a swimmer's dividing water,and slip inside.

You will want to knowthat she was standingby an open window in an upstairs bedroom,motionless, a little wide-eyed,looking out at the orchard below,the white dress puddled at her feeton the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarmentsin nineteenth-century Americais not to be waved off,and I proceeded like a polar explorerthrough clips, clasps, and moorings,catches, straps, and whalebone stays,sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebookit was like riding a swan into the night,but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,how her hair tumbled free of its pins,how there were sudden dasheswhenever we spoke.

What I can tell you isit was terribly quiet in Amherstthat Sabbath afternoon,nothing but a carriage passing the house,a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhalewhen I undid the very tophook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,the way some readers sigh when they realizethat Hope has feathers,that reason is a plank,that life is a loaded gunthat looks right at you with a yellow eye.

What a relief to undress and be undressed as she undresses and is undressed in this the poet's fantasy! Every woman who ever wore a bra or girdle, or pantyhose,or Spanx understands the feeling. “Wild nights!” she said in one poem, a gossamer-spun fantasy of her own.And now the poet laureate himself, reading the piece aloud:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5oUS3_3Dsg]

I Knew She Was No Mouse

Up until now we've had only one photo of that famous recluse Emily Dickinson, in which she does look somewhat unformed and even mouselike. (Think of Robert Burns’s ode to that small rodent: "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, O what a panic's in thy breastie!") She looks timorous and wee if not cowering. She also looks like you could blow her clean over by exhaling sharply in her presence.She was recovering from an illness at the time, family members said later. It’s why she was so thin in this 1847 daguerreotype of her, made when she was just 16.Now suddenly news has broken of a new picture of Emily which Amherst College believes is the poet for sure. (They keep all her archives – she lived in Amherst Massachusetts all her life and her dad was associated with the school.) Emily is the one on the left, sitting with her friend Kate Scott Turner.Amherst College worked with Dr. Susan Pepin, Director of Neuro-Ophthalmology at New Hampshire’s Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. She compared the two images one to one using scientific measurements. She says this is Emily all right, sitting with her recently widowed friend. She is 29.And here is the image made by a Vermont Firm called North 100, proving the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Watch the video to see the 16-year-old change into the 20-year-old and back again:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfdk4bi5GY&feature=relmfu]They are the ones who produced this living emergence of the wan girl into robust adult womanhood. They tell the story here , and within this link you can find a second link to the report by Dr. Pepin, who sees more clearly than the rest of us ever could about skin folds and eye size and even the shape of a person’s cornea who has been dead since the 1880s. She notes the way light shines in a certain way off that right eye of hers; you can see it as clear as day. That is an astigmatism. Dr. Pepin says, and it is identical in both pictures.So yes we have a resurrected Emily, that poet who wrote such wonderful things I practically keep a list of them by my bedside. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see her in full health with that almost-mischievous smile playing about her lips.She made so many sly cracks about organized religion, and love, and time, and yet she herself worshipped at the altar Nature, and knew what love felt like even if it was love at a distance, and sensed the ever-approaching End. Here is what she wrote once to the handsome John Long Graves who became a special friend in his years at Amherst and then, like all the others, moved away from the little village:“Much that is gay I have to show if you were with me John, upon this April grass! Then there are sadder features, here and there, wings gone to dust that fluttered so last year – a moudering plume, an empty house in which a bird resided.... Where last year’s flies, their errands ran, and last year’s crickets fell! We too are flying , fading, John, and the song “here lies” soon upon lips that love us now will have hummed, and ended.”This passage has always brought me near tears, and it does that again today as I type it, especially as I attend the late summer sound of the acorns outside my window, dropping like small bombs on roof and sidewalk.'We too are flying, fading, John.' But not altogether, if we capture our thoughts in ink, or pigment, or musical note. Not altogether if we leave behind some sign of how it was for us when we were here.Look at that little smile. She was no mouse! She was a lioness!

Antidote to Loneliness

During my week alone I cleaned and sorted and filed all kinds of things and came upon this poem that our Uncle Ed had saved among his papers.He lived alone for 20 years - more  even.Ever since 1991, when his beloved wife Fran had to go into a nursing home with her Alzheimer's, and then for the 12 years after she died and before he followed her into death this past April.I remember sending him it.My daughter had sent it to me.Between me and other family members, we saw him four days a week but I suspect the other days were long indeed.I hope that it comforted him and that he believed its message. Anyway here it is.It's called 'Everything is Waiting for You' and it's by David Whyte.

Your great mistake is to act the dramaas if you were alone. As if lifewere a progressive and cunning crimewith no witness to the tiny hiddentransgressions. To feel abandoned is to denythe intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,even you, at times, have felt the grand array;the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowdingout your solo voice. You must notethe way the soap dish enables you,or the window latch grants you freedom.Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.The stairs are your mentor of thingsto come, the doors have always been thereto frighten you and invite you,and the tiny speaker in the phoneis your dream-ladder to divinity.Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease intothe conversation. The kettle is singingeven as it pours you a drink, the cooking potshave left their arrogant aloofness andseen the good in you at last. All the birdsand creatures of the world are unutterablythemselves. Everything is waiting for you.