Through Fine Curtains, Looking At Her Coming Up the Walk For The Last Time

["safe in their alabaster chambers"

=Emily Dickinson]

[for Julie Harris in her portrayal of "The Belle of Amherst"]

the sunrise of the half-risen strays

through fitful curtains, choking the days

that lie before-

to summer's brim with

whatever it is-

they will not say to your face,

too croaking to be remembered;

though you've brought flowers,

whole meadows full, and buckets of Grace,

your cherry-sprigged bonnet-

and new mown everything.

there is no birdsong here; no wooded greens.

faint trickling of a dried up stream-

a ransacked drawer of odds and ends;

a picked lock scream as suddenly, stifled:

you rob- just yourselves.

selective invitations on cream paper,

illegible as a dream within a dream or calling cards,

in someone else's gilded handwriting with

swiss-dotted "i's".

the tapping of a bold foot on a Sunday floor,

clean-swept- a merry look thwarted.

-it looks like snow, you offer;

they contradict -it's May.

the afternoon ravels on its way.

and if you try to speak in thick blues and greens,

in rivulets of feeling, rose fraught gleams

above the teacup clatter, the bacon and eggs,

the sauce pan chatter-

to sense- bright rivers of words! breaking on the tip of a blackberried sweetness, mid-conversation-

they bolt and leave you speechless:

dispensing-

whatever's left of time, in meager

party prizes, always to someone else;

while looking slantwise at your dress-

their Delft-

(as if you'd stolen it)-

handing you, your galoshes.

oh pour it all down the drain

with your thin lipped receipts for

raspberry vinaigrettes, peerless pimento cheeses

in seven counties (oh, Pleiades...);

your boiling rhubarb, spoilt silk

tea time's tipping over! 

I'm like a pearl edged bird, invisible in the blizzard

of your disparaging till I cry in a voice of yellow diamonds oh

why-

why have you quenched the golden

mary angela douglas 9 june 2014

Note on the poem: This is how I imagine Emily Dickinson calling on the neighbors (a custom of the time) for the last time after which she went into her famous seclusion at home only seeing those who dropped by.  See her beautiful poem, The Soul Selects Her Own Society for all we have, really, of her state of mind regarding perhaps these social moments among other things, metaphysical souvenirs of a haunting loveliness.