Emily, It Is Getting Late (Second Version)

[for Mary Adalyn Young-Douglas]

for Emily Dickinson

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

the quotidian you somehow find
an open window through which shines
so close at hand your own Sublime

and then I hear from distant years
a background music suitable to you
it’s 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’d like to think
He’s pouring over them again

tipping back His amethyst chair
as any fond Father would
but in my sleep

an unnamed orb keeps bleeding ivory words
and disappearing
as it did, (I think) 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 an infinite girlhood

since it was just you singing, singeing them…
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;rev. 29 march 2018; slight rev. 6 march 2021

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