For Emily Dickinson

for Mary Adalyn Young-Douglas

Emily, it is getting late:             

the blaze on the trees and

the blaze on the  poems are one;

the snow clouds tick the towns away

and I am on my own to stare

at the wall that  readily turns to stars.

 I know that you would understand

the quatrains of this early moon

the open question of the wind

like something from Charles Ives*

that moves

over the same bent fields.

while in a golden age we think

we may have many  years to see

but the maple’ s  ensign warns us

you are nearer than

these  silver riddles fluttering from your hands

 we still can read:

 Inscribed with their own answers

As God’s may be -  I like to think

He’s  pouring over them again

tipping back His amethyst chair

as any fond Father-

 but in my sleep

an unnamed orb  keeps bleeding ivory`words

and disappearing

as it did, so many times for you-

the lamp’s unlit…

and it’s nothing’s  set upon the household candlestick now:

vivid for a nation or a world within a world;

within each  secret’s  secret self

to counter  the miniature glorias set in pearl

you well remember as flame-

since it was just you  singing them with no reply.

I can’t dispel  the sense of something blamed  or

someone radiant lingering here

 with somewhat more to say on these lost subjects…

I stand stock -still by the mossy door

where Beauty’s shadow seems to veer

and wonder only to myself

just who in the glittering days ahead

will comprehend

as if by  heart-as if they wrote the words themselves-

the least hue in your brightening palm

the gleaming instant caught out in surmise

I seem to clasp,

so briefly, meadow-sweet-

and vastly-then, as now-

before the first

or the last snows of Poetry itself-

mary angela douglas 9-10 october 2011

*reference to Charles Ives ( American New England composer) musical composition: “The Unanswered Question” which he refused to identify.