Of Jane and Emily

I saw the movie "Becoming Jane" last week. It is a romance, based, very loosely, on Jane Austin's life, and in particular a sentence in one of her letters to her sister, saying that she had flirted with a Mr. Lefroy at a party. The movie got a lot of things just right - her father the country parson - her dashing brother who married cousin Philadelphia (whose first husband lost his head to the guillotine in France) - Jane's lively wit.

As for the romance between Jane and Mr. Lefroy - well, all the romantics in the theater wished it were true. Jane Austin wrote the most wonderful love stories and we all wanted to think that she had once experienced a passion of her own. But Jane Austin never married. She was very briefly engaged, but called it off, choosing to remain single rather than marry without love.

Another wonderful writer who never married is the poet, Emily Dickinson. There are rumors of an unrequited love for a married man, but no one really knows, and no one believes there was anything physical between them. However, there are tantalizing hints of passion in her writing that give one pause.

The following poems are by or about Emily, but are for Jane as well.

Emily Dickinson

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!



Billy Collins

Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes

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

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

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it 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 dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

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

For My Sister

My sister is a remarkable person, and a whole lot of fun. She writes, too, though I won't publish what she's written. These poems are for her:

Ladies

Dorothy Parker

The ladies men admire, I've heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints...

So far, I've had no complaints.


Touch Me

Stanley J. Kunitz


Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.



From “Garden”
II

Hilda Doolittle


O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

Nobody is Perfect

The first baseball game I ever saw all the way through was on September 2, 1972. This was the year I was married. My husband and I had recently moved to the Chicago area, and we were finally able to watch the Cubs on WGN. Milt Pappas was pitching for the Cubs against the San Diego Padres. I was sitting by my husband trying to see what he found so fascinating about watching baseball, and particularly the Cubs. Of course, that was the game in which Pappas came within one pitch of a perfect game. He retired the first 26 batters. He went 2 and 2 to the next batter, then the umpire called the next 2 pitches balls and the player walked. Pappas retired the next batter for a no-hitter and the Cubs won. I think Jack Brickhouse must have been announcing, and he was hoarse with excitement.

I realize now what a great game that was. But I have to admit, at the time I was complaining to my husband that "nothing is happening - no one even gets to first base". I was almost convinced that baseball was the slowest, most boring game ever invented. I was not too bored to continue to watch the Cubs, however, and I've been something of a baseball fan ever since. I've never seen another no-hitter, but I haven't given up hope.

Bill Buckner used to be a Cub, so I was immediately attracted to the following poem. I like the poem, too, because of the image of life coming at you so fast you miss it.

This poem is also about forgiveness - not only forgiving Buckner, but forgiving yourself and being forgiven.

Forgiving Buckner
John Hodgen

The world is always rolling between our legs.
It comes for us, dribbler, slow roller,
humming its goat song, easy as pie.

We spit in our gloves, bend our stiff knees,
keep it in front of us, our fathers' advice,
but we miss it every time, its physic, its science,
and it bleeds on through, blue streak, heart sore,
to the four-leaf clovers deep in right field.

The runner scores, knight in white armor,
the others out leaping, bumptious, gladhanding,
your net come up empty, Jonah again.
Even the dance of the dead won't come near you,
heart in your throat, holy of holies,
the oh of your mouth as the stone rolls away,
as if it had come from before you were born
to roll past your life to the end of the world,
till the world comes around again, gathering steam,
heading right for us again and again,
faith of our fathers, world without end.

Empty Nest

My son left home on Friday so I rented a carpet shampooer and cleaned the carpets upstairs. There are those who will remember that when my daughter left home I cleaned all the windows in the house. It's the same thing, really, cleaning the empty nest.

My husband does not clean when under stress. He buys himself something. (Ask him what he bought himself at the Apple store.) He did help with the carpet cleaning, moving furniture at my direction, and actually looking up the instructions on the website so I could use the machine properly. Unfortunately, I had already dumped about 2 gallons of water into my son's bedroom rug before we figured out what I was doing wrong. I got most of it vacuumed up. It will dry out.

My son will say, "I haven't really left. I'm just visiting my sister." But he only bought a one-way ticket, and he took his resume with him. It's OK. He needs to find his dream.


Edwin Arlington Robinson
From Tristram

I am not one
Who must have everything; yet I must have
My dreams if I must live, for they are mine.
Wisdom is not one word and often another,
Till words are like dry leaves under a tree;
Wisdom is like a dawn that comes up slowly
Out of an unknown ocean.

The Road Not Taken

I understand that the Vatican recently issued the 10 Commandments of Driving. I haven't seen them, but I would like to propose another:

If you are in the LEFT TURN ONLY lane, TURN LEFT.

It's a simple concept, but one that a lot of people don't seem to understand. At least 3 times a week, I get into a left turn only lane, confidently expecting to turn left. The green arrow comes on, and the idiot in front of me inches forward, then stops, throws on his right turn signal and waits to merge into the forward moving traffic. Does he imagine that a fast-moving rush-hour stream of traffic is going to let him merge? Does he think that the people behind him, who really do want to turn left before the light changes, are thinking sweet thoughts about him and wishing him well? Guess again. Yesterday I saw a dyslexic minivan suddenly swerve out of the left turn only lane, cross two east bound lanes of traffic, and turn right.

No, the only thing to do if you are in a left turn only lane is turn left. If you didn't want to turn left, turn anyways, find a safe place to turn around and go back. The people behind you will bless you. Anyhow, who knows what you might discover on your little side trip.


The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.