Emily Dickinson Sits In With Us

Mom and I quite separately have been thinking a lot about Emily Dickinson.

Everybody should read Emily Dickinson.  If we all have to die, we should all practice by seeing things as she did, with that strange transcendent tangle of life and death that she perceived so clearly and that hangs around us all.

The other day, during an interminable meeting with a representative of the funeral home, I scared up “The Bustle In A House” on my iPhone and re-read it.  

Today, after complaining about the lack of dignity that her disease thrusts on her, Mom told me she’d been thinking of the poem “There’s a Certain Slant of Light.”  

So this afternoon I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson to my mom out of her old college text, a wretched old edition by Robert Linscott that rubs out the rough language and dispenses with most of Dickinson’s maddening, beautiful dashes.

Mom’s undergraduate notes are crammed in the margins, scrawled on the metrics and themes.  Theres’s nothing remarkable about her marginalia: just the sorts of things that undergraduates respond to when professors let fall that the poem “is in trochaic meter” or “ballad meter,” or when they note that “the manuscripts have ‘heft’ and not ‘weight’ in the third line.”

Nothing remarkable except that as she sits dying and reading, her young self and her dying self meet, and sit side by side, her fingers scanning the lines and passing the book over to me.

The shadows hold their breath.

I’m keeping this book.