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]

Sad

I was so sad yesterday. In the supermarket, on the road, my eyes kept filling with tears and why? Because I hurt my ankle at dawn in the darkened driveway trying to get Uncle Ed’s wheelchair into my car? Because when I went to get him for his bloodwork he said he felt ‘bereft’ during the whole six days I was gone, causing me to feel I let him down? Because that's what we all do, let down the people we love who love us back even with our annoying habit of leaving the cabinet doors open as we cook?Maybe I’m sad because HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” ended last night and I just loved it, the way they got so much right about the year 1920. I once taught a course on the Twenties in America, so I know something about the era. The main thing I know is what that First World War did to people, which you see so clearly in the character of Jimmy Darmody: he has quite simply lost his humanity. (His hideously disfigured friend and fellow-vet Richard Harrow has the same problem only his wounds show.)How can people recover from such an experience? I heard a segment on This American Life about a child who had been in a Romanian orphanage until he was seven, literally tied in a crib with no stimulation, no human engagement... The couple who adopted him were at wit’s end by the time he was in adolescence; he was that violent. Then this adoptive mother underwent a special kind of therapy to bond her with her son the same way an infant bonds with its mother: by having the two gaze fixedly into one another’s eyes for hours at a time. It is an amazing and hopeful story.Maybe I was just sad because of my own mother's death and I shouldn’t really look on that loss as I did here yesterday. Maybe if I lie on my back now she and all my dear ones will come, the way Billy Collins says they do in this 30-second clip, pausing above us to watch til we sleep:[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3474890035450021520#]

THE DEAD by Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heavenas they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,they think we are looking back at them,which makes them lift their oars and fall silentand wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.