SAVING APPEARANCES

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Jeffrey Allan Hanson

March 2007 This dissertation entitled

SAVING APPEARANCES

by

JEFFREY ALLAN HANSON

has been approved for

the Department of English

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

______

Mark Halliday

Professor of English

______

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences HANSON, JEFFREY ALLAN, Ph.D., March 2007, Creative Writing

SAVING APPEARANCES (95 pp.)

Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday

This dissertation is divided into two parts: a discussion of the life and work of

Emily Dickinson as being relevant to a conventional definition of wisdom writing as well as the idea of Dickinson’s poetry as a demonstration of the poetic qualities of scriptural writing, and a collection of poems.

The following essay outlines some of the seminal points of comparison between

Dickinson and the historical tradition of Wisdom writing. The term wisdom writing here refers to writing usually considered outside of the bounds of poetry alone, although the utterance of divinely inspired rhetoric is often poetic in essence. Poetry can be proverbial and instructional. Dickinson’s poetry evinces these purposes but also demonstrate the dimension of dialogue and obsession with questions about the relationship between the individual and God.

The other section of this document is a collection of original poetry, wherein I have tried to address themes that continue to interest me, including: male-cruelty, the relationship between God and supplicant, and the individual’s conscious isolation.

Approved: ______

Mark Halliday

Professor of English

The whole world of all important things, I find in you, precious Marilyn.

Thank you for all of it, my love. Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge Mark Halliday for directing my writing efforts carefully and energetically to ensure for clarity and substance. I owe him much for his earnest and warm mentorship over a period of years. Also, without the depth of experience and scholarship provided by Marsha Dutton, Sharmila Voorokara, and Vladimir Marchenkov, this dissertation would not be the satisfactory document I feel it is. My friends, I thank you. 6

Table of Contents

Abstract...... 3

Dedication...... 4

Acknowledgements...... 5

Poetry as Scripture and Wisdom Literature in the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson..... 9

Wisdom Writing...... 12

Poetry ...... 13

Emily Dickinson ...... 17

Dickinson as an Ascetic...... 18

Dickinson and Christianity ...... 23

Dickinson and Modes of Wisdom Writing ...... 31

The Mystical Dickinson...... 37

Dickinson and Job...... 42

Part Two: Saving Appearances...... 49

San Diego A. A...... 50

Tools ...... 51

The Sell ...... 52

Saving Appearances...... 53

Still Life ...... 55

What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?...... 56

The Church Where I Go Has No Idols...... 57

Snow Blind...... 58

Moon Talk...... 59 7

The Magnificent Ninety...... 61

Penal Drift...... 63

Slow Dissolve ...... 65

Someday, Thunder ...... 66

Volunteers...... 67

Enough North...... 68

Valentine's...... 69

Out There ...... 70

Gifts...... 72

Night Light...... 73

The Very Very Goodness of Acting ...... 74

Naming a Place of Need ...... 75

Transworld ...... 77

Believing the Difference Matters...... 79

Autumn Out ...... 81

In the East ...... 82

The Picture of Frank ...... 85

Sleep...... 86

Doubtful Stamina...... 88

Puncture ...... 89

Amanuensis...... 90

Black ...... 91

Late Walk...... 92 8

Come Glory...... 93

Works Cited ...... 94 9

Part One:

Poetry as Scripture and Wisdom Literature in the Life and Work of Emily Dickinson 10

The author feels no satisfaction and the reader little assurance with qualifying

statements at the outset of an essay. Yet, for this writing, it must be so. Such a necessity need not be an expansive one for there is little more to note than two limitations. First,

only a quick survey of important points relevant to the thesis is possible for this brief

study as it does not greatly substantiate those points, but rather introduces them to fix

briefly each for the reader’s attention. Second, the purpose of this essay is, of course, to

recommend the logic of each argument, but also to note them all as worthy of further

elucidation in an essay of greater length. In addition, the central idea behind these

arguments is not entirely a new one, but rather a deviation from correlating ideas already

submitted by distinguished scholars. That said, the following essay will note striking

similarities of style and intent between Emily Dickinson and Old Testament authors in

the traditions of Wisdom Literature, as this writer hopes to add to the rich body of

information already available on the life and writing of a great American poet.

Certainly Dickinson readers have much for which to be thankful as academics

year by year propagate critical theories—both in agreement with former ones and at

variance with those—about the work and life of Emily Dickinson. The impressive

number of poems and letters, historical facts, the absorbing peculiarities and fascinating

details of her life and the enormous bulk of biographical and critical studies promise to

satisfy the curious for a long time. However, despite the volumes of information and

speculative analysis, in the end there remains the enigmatic figure of the woman herself,

whose private mysteries will no doubt remain always incompletely discovered.

Nevertheless, in the interim between the present and the late nineteenth century

when Dickinson was first recognized as an important American poet, major critical 11 schools have emerged to claim the poet as their own, in a sense, as being representative of particular critical and even political agendas. Yet no matter however heavily traveled the roads of inquiry into the work have advanced, other less familiar byways continue to come into view, leading researchers to provocative new conclusions about Dickinson’s psychology and the motives behind her writing. Emily Dickinson, Cynthia Griffin

Wolff’s authoritative biography, is a well-regarded study of Dickinson’s remarkable life and a discerning critical discourse on important aspects of her work. Wolff substantiates some of the reasons cited herein to define her place among important Christian writers. In

Daughter of Prophecy, Beth Maclay Doriani maps Dickinson’s method of “drawing on the Christian prophetic tradition to achieve power and authority as a woman prophet" (1).

These books support the view that Dickinson’s chief means of inspiration derived from her religious temperament and a relentless obsession to address evidential signs of a

Creator who coldly forces suffering on the world.

While it is true that problems of religious doubt do not entirely limit Dickinson’s inclusive vision and acute sensitivity to other subjects, her consistent interest in theological questions sustain the largest share of her imaginative energies. This is not a unique observation by any means. Dickinson’s Calvinist background predisposed her to contemplate important questions about her Christian faith, and many have already commented extensively on this issue. The idea, however, that Dickinson’s work reflects some of the traditional principles of Wisdom literature is one not so well researched and is therefore one that warrants exploration. 12

Wisdom Writing

Of course, religious motivations are accountable for much of the general history

of poetry, and this is particularly true in the case of ancient literatures where humans have

attempted to enter into a dialogue with the unknown and, in the process, have created the

enduring literary corpus of biblical and sacred writings:

[I]t is not strange that the poetry of religion should be the most natural and universal sort of composition. The spirit of man seeks expression for its most elemental feelings in the elevated phrases of rhythmic speech. Other forms of verse have occupied the attention of the bards and singers of all the ages, but religion has had the primal place. This is true in a double sense. The themes deliberately chosen by the great poets, as by the supreme artists in other areas of human interest, have been those related to the moral and spiritual life. (Hill xiv)

In order to locate the designation of the term Wisdom literature as it will be used throughout this essay, and to fix more exactly its place among literary genres, I will defer to the specific definition of Wisdom literature as “a term for the Jewish philosophical writings of the pre-Christian era. The following books of the Hebrew Bible [. . .] represent this type: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Sirach (Wisdom of Solomon).” Other biblical books of statutory and historical writings are not applicable here as these are outside the tradition. As Carolyn Miles Hill has indicated above, wisdom writing has emerged through a dialectical process of deep thought and, in the form of philosophy and art, a myriad of disparate reflections that ultimately converge as speculative and didactic assessments about life and living. Hebraic texts, like those listed above, and Psalms as well, are particularly poetic and ideological and proffer prudential admonitions to the

faithful, as well as skeptical challenges to the Divine Will. Crenskaw’s conceptual

definition of wisdom literature further refines the term as being compositions of: 13

proverbial sentence or instruction, debate, [and] intellectual reflection; thematically, wisdom comprises self-evident intuitions about mastering life for human betterment, gropings after life's secrets with regard to innocent suffering, grappling with finitude, and quest for truth concealed in the created order and manifested in Dame Wisdom. When a marriage between form and content exists, there is wisdom literature. (19)

In the preface to his recent book Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Harold Bloom explains his reason for examining wisdom writing as arising from “a personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, or recovering from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends” (1). Obviously,

Bloom’s purpose is to seek deep knowledge of literature that teaches and consoles.

Confining his treatment of wisdom writing to the West--the Greeks, the Jews, and seminal Christian authors--Bloom departs from the conventional treatment of the genre to include also secular writers he considers representative of the spirit of wisdom writers: a renaissance essayist, philosophers, scientists, and twentieth-century intellectual authors.

In this way, Bloom asserts that Wisdom does not lie within the province of religious composers only, but as well with other learned seekers who have attempted to answer the chafing questions of humankind: Why am I here? How should I live?

Poetry

Because poetry is a proven and enduring medium for philosophical reflection, and because the biblical wisdom books are in large part lyrically rendered, the figure of the

poet as an arbiter of realms both ethereal and earthly is justified and proper and one

Dickinson would have understood as particularly relevant to the literary ideologies of her

time:

The [Civil] [W]ar and the rhetoric surrounding it understandably sustained 14

America's interest in prophecy, and probably also Dickinson's. Prophecy also formed the center of transcendental poetics. Emerson had proclaimed a gospel of poetry as spiritual medium, the poet's office consisting of articulating the "spiritual facts" of earthly existence, with the effect of emancipating humanity through the poet's "sublime vision." For Emerson, the poet was prophet, utterer of spiritual truth-an idea Dickinson knew from reading Emerson's essay "The Poet," which she owned. (Doriani 8)

Poetry, then, by either Bloom’s definition or Emerson’s, is an aesthetic avenue to profound contemplations. According to Richard Moulton, Wisdom literature is a mediation to render and articulate a vision meant to impose order and method upon a dark, chaotic universe. The texts convey the wisdom of experience and an intuitive explorative and incomplete knowledge born of philosophic query. Wisdom literature is a binary incarnation of proverbial instruction and informed conjecture:

It is only when comparison is made with the kindred department of Prophecy that we see the right of Wisdom literature to be classified under the head of Philosophy, the organ of reflection. Prophecy also is concerned with conduct; but it starts always with a Divine message, on which all that it contains is based. Of course Wisdom is in harmony with the revelation contained in Law and Prophecy, but it never appeals to it. The sayings of the Wise come to us only as the result of their own reflections, in combination with the general tradition of Wisdom. (256)

How is poetry wise? To say Dickinson wrote a sort of wise-scripture is not to suggest that other poets, many poets in fact, do not write wise poetry as well. Poets also assemble their lyrical compositions in a style that appears scriptural. Typically spare of exposition, poetry often comments on cosmic questions in seemingly irreducible terms.

Enigmatic of phrase and axiomatic as the embodiment of essential moral admonition, poems can promise readers “a momentary stay against confusion,” as Robert Frost said in his essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” and a way to enjoy “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew” (777). Therefore, the quest for revealed knowledge is 15 often achieved through the agency of poetry, and a reader’s epiphanic discovery is achieved in the same manner that intuitive truth becomes manifest to the visionary. The association between the two experiences is well established: “The quest of the wise to interpret reality, suffering, and the order of things is integrated with a struggle to understand the quest itself and the God who launched them on that quest” (Habel 60).

Behind Frost’s overlay of rustic themes and Yankee pragmatisms one perceives a deeply essential discourse between the poet and a terrifying, conspicuously modern, universe. Frost was certainly a wise writer, one who considered carefully the old mammoth dilemmas of the human condition and in the course of his meditations recommended to every listener his astute observations and prudent advice. He does so in the poem “Revelation”:

We make ourselves a place apart Behind light words that tease and flout, But oh, the agitated heart Till someone really find us out.

`Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God afar, So all who hide too well away Must speak and tell us where they are.

Here Frost considers individual isolation and how all persons, to some degree greater or less, conceal their essential selves from others. On the surface, the poem recommends the sensible and practical benefit of revealing before the world one’s genuine personality. If one, however, closely scrutinizes Frost’s meaning, a serious 16

implication emerges: because oblivion will utterly conceal forever all personalities, one

must reveal the secret self and lay claim to existence. There is playfulness apparent in the speaker’s tone, as if the habit of hiding the true self is an amusing human trait. However, the final line of the poem is an imperative statement and clearly indicates the serious nature of the subject. Frost does not say the need is urgent; however, it is, in his view, a requirement. Importantly, though, readers arrive at their own conclusions and participate, with the poet, in a revelatory experience. Obliquely, indirectly, without the muscular prodding of moral admonition, Frost offers “self-evident intuitions about mastering life for human betterment” or strategies for “grappling with finitude, and quest[ing] for truth.” Of course, poetry often scribes a didactic geometry, so to speak. This is fine.

Beyond questing for beauty of expression, the chief aim of the good poet is to teach, to reveal truths, to reinforce or to question the ideals, values, or rules for living.

Frost and his poem are wise; wisdom advises secular worlds as well as those considered sacred. However, and this point must remain persistently relevant to this discussion, while Frost and others may demonstrate their qualifications as sage-writers or wise-poets, Wisdom Literature--for its two-fold purpose to promulgate moral counsel or practical instruction for pious living, and to question through implication the religious status-quo--defines not only an historical literary genre, but one categorically different from secular wisdom writing. The Frostian poet (Frost stands here as a type for profane poets) does not feel constrained to regard the universe as one exclusively subject to or reflective of Divine law. The secular poet, as wise as he might be, entertains a multifarious set of propositions to explain the world as one with or without a powerful deity. 17

Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s primary motivations, on the other hand, her anxieties, her means for questing after truth, and the insights on experience she most valued, are the unique endowments of a religious vision arising from her belief in a divinely ordered universe.

Consider Dickinson’s poem:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too? Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog! (#288)

In this poem, the speaker does not value nor recommend a revealing-of-the-self as the speaker does in Frost’s “Revelation.” Instead, these words seem whispered; the desire for a conspiratorial other does not force Dickinson’s speaker to urge the reader to change,

nor does she suggestively mandate the need for a secret-sharer, as does the voice in

Frost’s poem. Dickinson’s question invites another; her speaker demonstrates a confident

desire for an anonymity which countermands other obligations, and against Frost’s advice

to participate honestly in the life of human endeavor, Dickinson clearly values an

observant passivity enjoyed, as the speaker implies, by the very few. Her poem advocates

diminishment, not revelation. One sees in Dickinson’s speaker humility of purpose

suggestive of a ruminative and exclusive psychology. Frost values exposure and self- declaration, perhaps as a last resort, but ultimately, yes. Dickinson understands the greater satisfaction availed of silence. Her speaker listens as one receptive to different voices and shows a remarkable strength of will enclosed by a delicate bearing. Wolff 18

devotes much of her biography to this trait in Dickinson‘s character. That is, Dickinson quested, and “[h]aving forfeited society’s cooperation in defining self when she rejected

the roles usually available to women, she discovered that this ‘I,’ the ‘poet,’ was in some

ways better than the roles offered by Amherst to anyone (man or woman), a secret,

privileged inner self that could observe life to analyze and criticize with complete safety”

(128). If Dickinson’s speaker cannot sway another to be “a nobody” like herself, she will

clearly do quite well on her own.

Dickinson as an Ascetic

Other biographers have commented at great length on Dickinson’s unusual need for isolation, but few have compared this need with the like need of the religious hermit.

Dickinson cannot be classified as such. However, a correlation should be made in the

course of this discussion. Ascetics are a rare and sometimes fanatical group of religious zealots whose practices of seclusion and physical deprivation can be compared to the

limitations Dickinson imposed on her social life. There is, however, the interesting and

curious fact that her effort to remain physically aloof from her community of visitors and

correspondents is a reasonable indication of her desire for greater interiority, so there

might be lived a consistently contemplative existence. “What seems . . . likely,” argues

Ward, “is that she deliberately set limitations on the scope of her social life in order to

achieve the ultimate artistic communion, the exploring of an inner world. And the

exploration of that inner world must have been for her paradise enow.” (1)

In later years, her need for privacy became so pronounced it seemed nearly a

palpable essence to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who after meeting Dickinson referred 19 to her seclusion as a “fiery mist.” To quantify the degree of Dickinson’s hermetic life, we must note the fact Dickinson’s brother Edward maintained a thirteen-year extramarital relationship with Mabel Todd Loomis, who never in that time met the poet face to face, but who would occasionally sing, at Dickinson’s request, at the bottom of the stairs as she listened from her room. This anecdote emphasizes how rigidly she managed this essential necessity. Dickinson also reveals in many of her poems, like the one below, a rationale for sequestration:

THE SOUL’S superior instants Occur to Her alone, When friend and earth’s occasion Have infinite withdrawn.

Or she, Herself, ascended To too remote a height, For lower recognition Than Her Omnipotent.

This mortal abolition Is seldom, but as fair As Apparition—subject To autocratic air.

Eternity’s disclosure To favorites, a few, Of the Colossal substance Of immortality.

Beyond the recognition of earthbound acquaintances, the speaker here is transformed by distance. The realm is one rarified and utterly exclusive to the single autocrat, a favorite of Eternity’s--note that it is time personified rather than God who chooses her--who allows her a glimpse of a supreme mystery: immortality. A sort of hubris of position that comes with privilege distinguishes this traveler from all others who cannot share this deeply personal vision. 20

Family letters and interviews have related Dickinson’s preferred manner of

visitation, which required the guest to sit “next to a door which stood ajar, on the other

side of which was Emily, and thus the conversation [would be] carried on without either seeing the other’s face (Leyda 2:120). Perhaps to discover wisdom by means of intellectual reflection, and to learn an idiosyncratic language to express it, mandates that

one seek the desolate tract as best to perceive in full silence the certainty of one’s vision.

Dickinson’s famous test for discovering true poetry seems less a declaration about

emotional power the poem might possess and more about its ability to stimulate deeply

the intellectual faculties of the soul. Words like “cold”—the sort of arid freeze unrelieved

by warming emotions—and her suggestion of a liberating cerebral expansiveness

describe someone who understands the experience of immediate ecstasy: "If I read a book

[and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If

I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." (Bianchi

276)

Modes of interiority and dislocation seem to have energized Dickinson to lock on

to a personal agenda that must have seemed odd and beyond the understanding of her

neighbors. A self-imposed isolation can resemble the self-denying life of the ascetic who

earns, by means of a deliberate desensitizing to worldly distractions, a visionary clarity of

mind. However, what connections can be successfully made between Dickinson and the

visionary? For one, a contemplative personality like Dickinson’s is not likely to embrace

publicity. Dickinson’s strong avowals to remain unpublished are at least informative of, if

not directly relevant to, an association between her and writers of biblical wisdom books

who devoted themselves to duty and forever obscured their names from history. Her 21

letters to those admirers who repeatedly requested permission to publish her work in

popular journals of the day nearly always were kind but dismissive. For Dickinson, as it

must have been for the compilers and writers of Biblical literature, writing was a

sacramental act and self-diminishment, a creed for creating a textual luminosity, the word

existing beyond the entanglements of self-aggrandizement. Poetry as scripture must deny

the poet’s unveiling and evince the sacred purpose of that poet to make actual the mind of

God, to interpose upon silence the unadulterated will of the Divine. In Dickinson’s case,

God’s voice can only be known as a countervailing personality behind the writing, one

entrenched and opposed to Dickinson’s accusatory portrait of a stern Hebraic Lord.

Dickinson’s social aversion and her choice of heremetic lodging powerfully

support one’s impulse to equate her with religious ascetics of the past. Dickinson‘s consistent regard for natural beauty and her disregard for materiality are familiar motifs

of the devotional life of a religious renunciate. Poem 486 portrays such an existence:

I was the slightest in the House-- I took the smallest Room-- At night, my little Lamp, and Book-- And one Geranium--

So stationed I could catch the Mint That never ceased to fall-- And just my Basket-- Let me think--I’m sure That this was all--

I never spoke--unless addressed-- And then, `twas brief and low-- I could not bear to live--aloud-- The Racket shamed me so--

And if I had not been so far-- And any one I knew Were going--I had often thought 22

How noteless--I could die—

Indeed, as the mint, so the being, eventually submerged beneath the unrelenting wash of

oblivion. As visitors to the Dickinson home can attest, the poem--as far as it can be said

to speak for the poet herself--is quite accurate in describing Dickinson’s small bedroom

and spare furnishings: a little desk and chair, a lantern, a narrow bed, a single chest-of- drawers. When Higginson requested from Dickinson a portrait photograph, she responded with a list of self-descriptive adjectives that nearly erase her figure from one’s imagination all together: “Could you believe me without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves” (Bianchi 241). Dickinson often referred to her diminutive stature, and her niece remarked how little her aunt thought “to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life (Bianchi 5). “[T]he little tippler” (“I Taste” #15) remained completely aware of her value and dignity as a human being, so thoughts of death continually haunt her verses as if they were too fantastic to fully grasp. The speaker in the above poem explains the recurrent realization that the personality can be so easily and so quickly excised from life. The falsely insouciant tone of the final line underscores the terror one feels in anticipation of an eternal and complete devaluation of the soul. One’s

effects, influence, friends, and tethers to being must vanish as quickly as the snowflake that falls into flames. While Dickinson’s speaker seems apparently resigned to an inevitable end, the heart must condemn circumstances and ask Why? 23

Dickinson and Christianity

Sadly perhaps, as desperate as her letters and poetry show her to be for some

intuitive knowing about death and for a satisfying rationale for human suffering,

Dickinson remained unconvinced by Calvinist theodicies. However, though Dickinson could be searingly impious in her writing, she was no atheist, a fact that legitimizes her position as a Challenger-of-the-Divine-Will. Wolff has explained how “Dickinson’s rejection of faith in 1850 was not . . . a renunciation of the belief that God exists: in some

manner, she retained a deeply rooted conviction in the existence of God until the day she

died; the terms of her belief fluctuated, but the flame of it was never quenched” (143).

Like the besieged Psalmist, who notes the Lord’s supreme prerogative to do with the

faithful what will be done, Dickinson escaped the torments of her restive intellect to find

solace where words could provide a place for her, “[s]ome sufficient ‘self’ to counter the

dark menaces of oblivion” (Wolff 127). The Psalmist writes of Death‘s cruel regency in

a world of Godly design: “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their

breath, they die, and return to their dust” (Psalm 104: 29).

Like the Psalmist, Dickinson urged forth from her agitated spirituality an

indictment of the Creator who made Death and Suffering. Hers is an intimate contention,

as she felt she knew this God. The same sense of intimacy pervades the Psalms when the

terrified psalmist bares his soul and pleads for safe deliverance from destruction to the

Father who has given to all the conditional gift of life. Finally, as does the disconsolate

Psalmist, so does Dickinson; she materializes upon the page a Voice to engage in

discourse, a voice to vitalize the omniscient and omnipresent Absence who maliciously

mocks the suppliant. The psalmist implores: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry 24

come onto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thy ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily“ (Psalm 102:1, 2). Dickinson is

bitter:

Of Course--I prayed-- And did God Care? He cared as much as on the Air A Bird--had stamped her foot-- And cried “Give Me”-- My Reason--Life-- I had not had--but for Yourself-- `Twere better Charity To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb-- Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb-- Than this smart Misery. (P141)

Dickinson again invokes an image of tiny physicality. In fact, Dickinson provocatively

suggests a logic and merciful relief in pinching from existence one’s consciousness. A complete obliteration of self promises the blessed state of unfeeling ignorance of a

“Smart Misery” when “Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / That nibbles at the soul --”

(“This World Is Not Conclusion” 20, 21).

Dickinson’s ironic wish in poem #141 starkly contrasts with her committed effort to say with conviction what others failed, or feared, to say, and she would do so with the singularly fearsome determination of a prophet. Like a pronouncement, Wolff explains:

“Thus it came to pass that [Dickinson] confided her faith not to God unseen, but to the power of her ‘word‘” (128). Poetry became a means to establish for her an identity of importance and consequence in a world where a woman’s potential for greatness was consistently disregarded. Wolff cites the fact that the Dickinson household was

dominated by a substantial male presence in the legacies and assertive energies of

grandfather, brother, and father. These masculine figures had no interest in engaging in 25 any meaningful way with Dickinson’s considerable intellect. Nor did God, it seemed, wish to provide her a release from her doubts and confusions by revealing Himself to her understanding. Like a miserable Psalmist, Dickinson found in the written word a forceful articulation of, and a freeing way to reveal, her deeply felt dissatisfaction with the

Creator.

It might be right to say that Dickinson suffered her faith. It is absolutely correct to add that had skepticism allowed a complete denial of the existence of a God she could not worship, she would have remained a supremely gifted but utterly different poet.

Dickinson could not disbelieve, however; nor could she meekly affirm. Dickinson would bear the scourge of conscience and like the wise Psalmist ask for a rational reprieve from doubt to no avail:

It is too little to say that faith eluded Emily Dickinson. Her poetry, the ‘Breath’ that could compete with death, was founded on the conviction that a genuinely religious poet would have to grapple earnestly with faith by matching Christ’s fable and the promises in it against the evidence offered by the visible world.” (Wolff 263)

In consequence of this “grapple” with faith, Dickinson the poet used the only means she knew to gain some advantage in her battle with God: “When God has elaborated a myth concerning his relationship to the created world, the artist can refashion that myth to expose His dissimulation” (Wolff 302). Dickinson’s complete assumption of the role of wisdom-writer might account for the confidence and courage with which she confronted an Almighty power. It is not likely that others whom she knew would venture so much. In this sense, as Wolff says, “Dickinson was an anachronism.

Writing rebelliously, but writing nonetheless within the great tradition of latter-day

Puritanism, Emily Dickinson was a time traveler from an earlier epoch. She was 26

determined to construe writing as an heroic undertaking [ . . . ]” (255). Like the

confrontation between Jacob and the angel at Peniel, Dickinson would confront her

opponent with an amazing resolve to wrench from her opponent justifications for the

mysteries that for her remained untenable.

Frost (as secular poet) could not wrestle for dominion over the oppressive force of

the universe because he did not understand that force to be intelligent. Dickinson, on the

other hand, confronts her God intimately and angrily, as one would a force of personality

or another’s uncompromising self-will. For Dickinson, the quarrel was personal. “Like the Christians of [the] primitive age, Emily Dickinson did not doubt God‘s reality. A simple declarative sentence begins the poem that describes God‘s game of cosmic hide-n- seek” (Wolff 261):

I know that He exists. Somewhere—In Silence— He has hid his rare life From our gross eyes.

`Tis an instant’s play. `Tis a fond Ambush— Just to make Bliss Earn her own surprise!

But—should the play Prove piercing earnest— Should the glee—glaze— In death’s—stiff—stare—

Would not the fun Look too expensive! Would not the jest— have crawled too far! (P338)

Dickinson’s speaker is one not to be fooled. In effect, she cannot dismiss God as a fable. If God does not exist, then she has no reason to feel outrage at the insufferable 27

problems plaguing human beings. Instead, the speaker knows He exists; He cannot hide

well enough to excuse Himself from culpability; Dickinson’s poem does not let God off

the hook. Silence is an imposition of the Master’s will. The speaker wonders about a God

Who wishes to materialize suddenly from the shadows to startle the seeker. The resulting

disclosure that there is a God will bring joy to believers, if the game is real. And, indeed,

if real, why must such an essential game play out at all? “[W]hat are we to do when (like

some cruel parody of a Master Poet) He hides Himself so pitilessly only to command that

mankind find Him out and affirm that He is benevolent?” (Wolff 148). The very fact that

God exists indicts Him for criminal behavior. Dickinson relies on the reader’s good sense

and ideas of propriety to sustain her view that the game is both unnecessary and patently malicious, as the spiritually debilitating game of hide-n-seek between God and humanity afflicted Dickinson at her constitutional core. Frost might observe with amusement how people desire an affirming presence to know them truly as they exist--“But so with all, from babes that play / At hide-and-seek to God afar”--but for Dickinson, God, it would seem, played cruelly and deceptively with the faithful. God had enacted a terrible desertion and this was “an horrific discovery. If God’s moral order is but a sham, what confidence can any of us repose in His natural order—or in any of the orders of life upon which our fragile existence depends?” (Wolff 149). Wolff explicates poem #415 as one where Dickinson seems especially vulnerable to this notion of divine duplicity: “Sunset at

Night--is natural-- / But Sunset on the Dawn / Reverses Nature--Master-- / So

Midnight’s--due--at noon. / Eclipses be--predicted-- / And Science bows them in-- / But

do one face us suddenly-- / Jehovah’s Watch--is wrong.” If God’s face is eclipsed and

His watch dissolved, the humanity too must suffer annihilation. 28

Dickinson’s recorded agonies and written recriminations are not outside the conventions of Wisdom Literature. While a general idea about writers of Wisdom literature suggests their texts would be largely laudatory, this premise is true only in part.

The scriptures present plenty of prudential and cautionary counsel for the faithful.

However, the Bible also is a repository of skeptical writing, particularly as found in the

Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and with greater specificity, the Book of Job. As a skeptic and a believer, Dickinson is soundly associated within the genre of Wisdom Literature as that genre is traditionally assigned to scriptural writers.

Importantly, and in spite of the categorical phrase of Wisdom Literature, there is no evidence to suggest that wisdom writers satisfactorily resolve their internal conflicts, but quite the contrary is true. The biblical record concedes that people suffer by design, so little remedy exists for relief but for them to fall on the mercies of a God who claims

Himself originator of all things. Direct confrontation with the Lord is rare in scripture, outside of the book of Job, that is. The value of wise discourse then is rather momentarily to focus fundamental uncertainties as being fraternal trials of every person and universal travails that must lead every petitioner ultimately to the seat of Absolute Power in complete obeisance. Emerson addressed this problem of the “old discontent”: “Man is a source whose source is hidden.” With the same attitude of surrender and acceptance so familiar to the Hebraic scriptures, he concedes: “I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine” (252).

It is true. Poets are sometimes believed as being privy to a place of a seminal

Truth. It may also be true that poets are innately prone to empathy for others when the

Truth wounds. Like wisdom writers of old who believed in the value of the human 29 experience to teach and to warn of poor judgment, poets also know what rewards are rendered from the amalgam of Truth and suffering. Unfortunately for the sensitive poet, world-woes can weigh mightily, and so it is that Wisdom books abound with the plaintive cries of pious supplicants who implore a God grotesquely unmoved. Robert Alter has noted a conventional trajectory of emotional state in the Psalms:

The sense of emergency virtually defines the numerically predominant subgenre of psalm, the supplication. The typical—though not invariable— movement of the supplication is a rising line of intensity toward a climax of terror or desperation. The paradigmatic supplication would sound something like this: you have forgotten me, O Lord; you have hidden your face from me; you have thrown me to the mercies of my enemies; I totter on the brink of death, plunge into the darkness of the Pit. (186)

The voice of the Psalmist often quavers: “My God. my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent. But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel” (Psalm 22: 1-3).

According to Alter, no one can reasonably question the poetic attributes of the

Wisdom books, as they are unequivocally the work of sacred poets: “The interplay of poetry and prose is more definable because it is a formal issue, verse being scannable, even the ‘free rhythms’ of biblical parallelistic verse. Some texts, like Psalms, Proverbs,

Song of Songs, and all but the frame-story of Job, are unambiguously assemblages of poems” (54). Like the Psalmists’ artful supplications for spiritual grounding, Dickinson’s poems can often express the bewildering predicament of indeterminacy: “Behind me-- dips Eternity-- / Before Me--Immortality-- / Myself--the Term between” (P721). “The

Future--never spoke-- / Nor will He--like the Dumb-- / Reveal by sign--a syllable / of His

Profound To Come--” (P672). “Forever--is composed of Nows-- / `Tis not a different 30

time-- / Except for Infiniteness-- / And Latitude of Home--” (P624). Unlike the Psalmists,

however, Dickinson does not wish to secure herself to her reluctant savior but rather elects to suffer stoically the jostle of her doubts, as she is clearly no petitioner. God might be an absence, a fabrication, a myth to ease one’s terror and torment. Dickinson remains

resolutely subject to her own stormy consciousness and refuses to surrender to blissful

hope:

Me from Myself--to banish-- Had I Art-- Impregnable my Fortress Unto All Heart--

But since Myself--assault Me-- How have I peace Except by subjugating Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch How this be Except by Abdication-- Me--of Me? (P642)

Abdication of the self is not a possible option for Dickinson, whose quest for faith

always required that she keep intact her own strict resolve to understand on her terms.

And as Wolff explains: “Such anguish cannot be evaded or resolved because the intolerable tension does not result from ambiguous intentions or conflict over some mediated behavior. Instead, it seems an inherent and inevitable component of self- consciousness” (466). Peace, of course, can be claimed by anyone willing to suspend judgment and put away any subversive thinking about the logic and justice of God-rule.

Certainly Dickinson could “dwell in Possibility-- / A fairer House than Prose--” but she could not abide a peace installed with contingent terms. Rather, Dickinson would 31 participate in discovery of bliss by a “spreading wide [her] narrow Hands / To gather

Paradise” (P657). Dickinson and Psalmists alike bear up under difficulties, but not without versifying their quandaries. Both parties are poets consumed by the fires of their faith, both subject to and reflective of experiential, religious, and existential dilemmas; they share a similar disregard for self-notability and seem to have desired their writing to speak in universal terms. As it so often is for religious writers, the act and the result of their writing assured them the capacity necessary for articulating pain. Anderson explains with succinct accuracy the evolutionary progress of Dickinson’s aesthetic maturation:

Inevitably, her search for meaning within the self, as well as in the non- self outside, led to a search for rediscovery of the maker of these selves. A poem written in mid-career, of small intrinsic worth, has considerable interest as a statement of her progressive concern with nature, man, and God. At first she thought that “nature” was a sufficient subject for her poetry, she says, until “Human nature” came in and absorbed the other “As Firmament a Flame”; then, when she had just begun her exploration of that, “There added the Divine.” All of her major themes are listed here in order: the outer world and the inner, the other world and, by implication at least, the paradise of art as the nearest she could come to attaining the “Divine.” ( 221)

Dickinson and Modes of Wisdom Writing

Other characteristics of form and purpose distinguish qualities of Wisdom literature. Winward has noted how Hebraic prophets presented their messages "as a song or dirge, a hymn or a prayer, an argument or a dialogue, a parable or an allegory, an exhortation or a question, a vision or action"--presented always in a "concise and rhythmical" form (24). The combination of these modes--musicality, with aphorism (or the proverbial statement), all concisely expressed--make obvious the careful methodologies used to produce the scriptures. The deliberate nature of each composition 32 suggests the poet’s sense of the weight and consequence necessary for prophetic or wise utterances. Dickinson used these elements to imbue her words and her legacy with the same oratorical resonance she had inferred from the scriptures.

Musical meter shows noticeably in Dickinson’s early work, before more sophisticated departures from such configurations made the meter less discernibly reliable. Wolff notes the origins of this poetic device: “It has long been recognized that the underlying metrical structure of Dickinson’s work is the pattern of English hymnody”

(186). And Thomas Johnson mentions that “[c]opies of Watt’s Christian Psalmody or his collection of The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs were fixtures in every New

England household. Both were owned by Edward Dickinson” (54-55). It is proper to note how much church ritual and a Calvinist catechism pressures the explications of

Dickinson’s poetry. Sacred hymns for her possessed a special quality worthy of emulation, especially the Psalms that Alter notes are verse compositions originally set to music: “Over the centuries, Psalms was most clearly perceived as poetry, probably because of the actual musical indications in the texts and the obvious liturgical function of many of the poems” (172). According to Doriani, relevant similarities exist between the poetry of Dickinson and wisdom literature, “which is related to the prophetic writings through the genre of poetry and the shared emphasis on vision [. . .] which also includes song (for example, the Canticles). Dickinson's poems often have the form and rhythm of song" (3). Many critics have remarked on Dickinson’s frequent use of the common meter,

“which consists of alternating lines of eight and six syllables (8-6-8-6). Known in secular contexts as ballad stanza, common meter is usually rhymed abab or abcb in hymnals"

(Eberwein 152). Perhaps the hymn-meter best suited Dickinson’s desire to force each 33

poem to resonate as sacred song, mantric intonation, and prophetic utterance, as

Eberwein explains:

The hymn paradigm [ . . . ] informs explorations of Dickinson's themes, tone, and beliefs. She used language and tropes with homiletic resonances to comment on evangelical Protestant pieties such as Sabbath-keeping (P324), early rising (P112), and beelike busyness (P1533); to protest God's treatment of humans (P476, 1201); and to question Calvinist dogma. "This World is not Conclusion" (P501) admits in common meter that we cannot be certain of immortality. "The Road to Paradise is plain" (P1491), an ironic reworking of Watt's "Broad is the road that leads to death," leaves hymn stanzas behind as it confronts the doctrine of election. Drawing out the potentials of traditional forms, she "sang" in her own way (Eberwein 153) Like the ancient authors of sacred texts, Dickinson condensed her complicated

ideas about death and eternity. So stark and surprising is the clarity of a Dickinson insight that often as soon as one feels the meaning to be fully within one’s grasp, the complete reward of revelation begins to recede. The effect is profound, and makes a second reading necessary to brighten again the light of disclosure for those hoping to peer deeply into cosmic mysteries. Dickinson’s compressed lyrics set in motion a contemplation of fact or fancy and evoke from her reader through the agency of a single judicious observation a striking and mandatory re-assessment of experience. The technique is exemplified by many first lines as, for example, in the poems “The Brain--is wider than the Sky” (#632),

“Death is the Supple Suitor” (P504), “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” (P95), and

“The Love of Life Can Show Below” (#673). Gnomic statements are declared with such authority that one easily believes them to be emergent truths proceeding from some arcane logic. The manipulative structures of Dickinson’s poems propose advice or knowledge with a sapience of tone that readers might rightfully expect will lead them inevitably to an abiding truth that only scripture can promise in this way. An implied 34

body of knowledge then, rendered with the brevity of an incantation, with concise lineation in stunted quatrains, secures the reader’s sustained focus throughout. Wisdom writings often reveal how the writer creates this effect using the short aphoristic phrase:

The single line contains all that philosophic reflection requires; but the sense of form, even in the simplest Wisdom literature, is so strong that the thought conforms to the dimensions of the received pattern before it can obtain currency as a proverb. He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. The heart knoweth its own bitterness; And a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy. The supplement in these two examples is a parallel to the main thought, or its converse. Where the essence of the proverb is deep or obscure, the supplementary line comes to interpret it. (Moulton 258)

The last of three consistent features of Wisdom Literature, after (1) musicality and

(2) concision of line and stanza, as mentioned above, is the frequent use of (3) aphorism

as a means to counsel readers about living a good life. Even a quick scan of Dickinson’s

first-lines will produce a list of aphoristic phrases, making them closely resemble the

proverb. Had she not herself been convincingly able to replicate the timbre of a supreme

authority, Dickinson could not have availed herself of the power of tradition. Indeed, it is

a fierce psychology and ambition of will that accounts for Dickinson’s decision to

appropriate the biblical idiom that had for so long been the exclusive place of patriarchal

authority. Doriani explains that “[t]he concrete language, aphorisms, and antinomies of

Dickinson's poetry, [ . . . ] all of these are best explored within the tradition of scriptural

prophecy and wisdom and within the New England tradition of homiletics,” which evince

the frequent deployment of these same literary devices”. Calvinist poets, religious

training and biblical texts offered Dickinson and other poets not only forms of artifice for

their verse but also models of religious poets and speakers that could help shape their

religious voices” (3). 35

Dickinson’s father, Edward, habitually read the scriptures aloud at the breakfast table, as customarily with religious men of his day, some text or aphorism provided a moral lesson to ponder as the workday progressed. No doubt homiletics would have seemed particularly savory to Dickinson who was likely to have enjoyed intellectualizing their meaning; the language would appeal to her for its sagacious tone and for its meticulous rendering of a quintessential didactic schema. Doriani explains “Inspired by the model of the wisdom prophecy, Dickinson saved aphoristic scraps of prose and worked up letters and poems out of them. Repeatedly in her poetry and letters we come across proverbial sayings, in which she adopted the structure, theme, and the tone of the biblical prophets” (115). The voicing of her most assertive poems shows an eloquence and confidence of the Biblical sage. Eberwein agrees that aphorism was a useful device for Dickinson to advance her unique vision:

[A]phorism or epigram works on the basis of three qualities evident in many Dickinson poems (e.g., P185, " 'Faith' is a fine invention"): generalization, compression, and memorability. The meaning of an aphorism should be so broad that it comes across as folklore or established wisdom rather than personal observation. The expression should be compressed beyond the point of immediate accessibility; an aphorism should require figuring out and thus promote reflection. The form should be memorable -- balanced, clever, or vivid. The pontification characteristic of aphorism is often leavened by wit or self-parodying irony, as in P1641, "Betrothed to Righteousness might be.” (9)

Dickinson’s customary use of aphorisms and her cool sureness of tone lend the poems an authority that rebuffs any possibility that her speculations could ever be errant or less than expert. The voice is certainly not a voice of submission, nor one of concealment, but rather one that speaks with the full confidence and power of someone at home in all territories, one also who is keen to advance a singular agenda. Eberwein continues: “Even 36

when she draws her figures of speech from the language of the sea, of trade, of law, or of

science, they usually suggest that they have passed through the alembic of the King

James version of biblical utterance” (18).

Dickinson is known for an earnest playfulness; she took great pains to achieve the maximum grit of ironic postures and wry wit in her poems and often did so by carefully

undercutting the potency of the biblical maxim by imaginatively pressuring “the

Scriptures to make them come alive. The Bible was one of her chief sources of imagery

and of truth but, as with all original religious thinkers, only when she could test it against

her own experience and rewrite it in her own language” (Anderson 18).

The imminence of the [Civil] War encouraged a rhetoric of apocalypse as orators often questioned the purity of the nation and spoke of the war as God's judgment. Surrounded by a host of orators and self-proclaimed prophets, Dickinson responded with a wisdom literature of her own making. She drew on the prophetic tradition she knew best, the Judeo- Christian one, to claim both religious and Poetic authority. (Eberwein 238)

A dimension rare to religious writers is Dickinson‘s ability to render her

convictions powerfully in the idiomatic diction of biblical expression while

simultaneously undercutting the legitimacy of the language with the chiding and

insinuative tone that permeates her work, one rich with patently impious implications.

Many critics like Anderson have observed that Dickinson’s religious vision is not pious,

but rather one of intensely persistent and aggravated inquiry couched in mock scriptural

textualities:

Perhaps these were the principal words on which she had been fed from childhood, and her revolt against them as theology was paralleled by her revolt against the language in which their doctrines were cast. In a sense, the Bible was the divine adversary she must overcome by assimilation in order to utter her own scriptures. (32) 37

The Mystical Dickinson

At least one letter survives in which Dickinson mentions being overpowered by

an urge to understand the eternity imposed by death. Young, energetic, and keenly inquisitive, she remained awake many hours on many nights willing a comprehensible

answer. By sheer force of imagination she tried to penetrate the unknown until finally,

her resources exhausted, she understood that the mind could not apprise the seeker of

those mysteries that continued to elude the grasp of reason. One might naturally expect that a young Emily would first apply to God with her questions, or would have opened

the family Bible. However, the temper of the time recommended interiority as particularly sensible instead of hoping for signs or miracles. Early nineteenth-century religionists no longer looked only to heaven for moral direction, but also within. Because of ideas born of the Enlightenment, they perceived about them an increasingly anthropocentric universe; Dickinson would increasingly come to know a faith prompted

from within, that is, a faith of alternative origin from that of the Calvinist worshipers she

knew, as her spiritual appetite hungered for the sustenance of a faith that could abide her

peculiarly idiosyncratic religion. An early poem expresses Dickinson’s assured reliance

upon a faith derived by reason and one aligned with her understanding of a sanctified

natural world with which she could interact. She would continue to nurture a personalized

religious paradigm throughout her life.

SOME keep the Sabbath going to church; I keep it staying at home, With a bobolink for a chorister, And an orchard for a dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice; 38

I just wear my wings, And instead of tolling the bell for church, Our little sexton sings.

God preaches,—a noted clergyman,— And the sermon is never long; So instead of getting to heaven at last, I ’m going all along! (P324)

The aphoristic first verse anticipates the final justification for not “going to church.” The meter and rhyme scheme are hymnal, with lines of eight and six syllables and rhymed abab or abcb. Also, with concise precision, Dickinson makes her point quickly so that the reader is surprised and delighted at how effectively the argument to abstain from church service is made.

Wise, yes. However, was Dickinson saintly? Dickinson’s aesthetic sense proceeds from the ecstatic state. As a self-ordained intermediary betwixt and between orthodox and skeptical materialistic universes, her words are the emergent signs of a seminal logos, one holy and new and unregistered beyond the bounds of her experience. Such a position is a lonely one. Many of Dickinson’s poems delineate the solitary ritual of self- abnegation. Her God is one removed, an absence of powerful consequence. Writing of the poem #745, Wolff examines the qualities of sainthood she sees in the expression and intent of Dickinson’s words:

Renunciation--is a piercing Virtue-- The letting go A Presence--for an Expectation-- Not now-- The putting out of Eyes-- Just Sunrise-- Lest Day-- Day’s Great Progenitor-- Outvie

39

Wolff writes: “Saints have relinquished the ‘Presence’ of the visual world to fix their attention upon absence and hope. Again there is wounding; but now it is self-mutilation--

’The putting out of Eyes’” (190). The poem suggests that the believer may not believe in a God who is factual and evident by virtue of His presence, but rather can do only so well as to believe in the promise of an eventual revelation of God-hidden. One must renounce the need of evidence. Indeed, this is a different saint; modern, educated in secular knowledge when science, logic, and fact effectively challenged the mythos of a divine being. Dickinson truly trod new ground, and perhaps hyperbole is permissible here: the wilderness, the unmapped terrain of Dickinson’s quest--and, perhaps, torment as well--is a place for discovery. It seems Dickinson would martyr her life to vitalize and to sustain the world of her making. She would write a perceived world into being, one that denied

God, by celebrating the beauty of nature. The private pilgrimage cannot result in the revelation of the Biblical God. Yet she would obsess and focus the bulk of her energies on evincing His absence. Dickinson understood she would discover from circumstances at work, in the lives of friends, family, and her community about, visible condemning signs of a mute deity who abides no inquiry, acknowledges no pressure to justify pain, agony, or death. Dickinson’s sensibilities spied out the very heart of God, and as if with intimate assurance, she would dislodge from myth the guilty person of a Creator.

And so, the vision which engenders the word is sacred and privileged and therefore one transcendent of theodicy and disdainful of duplicity. By means of heightened language and by using some of the rhetorical devices of biblical drama and scripture, Dickinson addressed the comprehensive realm of human experience, a realm she knew as circumference. In a letter to Higginson, Dickinson claimed, “My Business is 40

Circumference.” This cryptic declaration says as much about her motivations as it does

about the mystery so frequently encountered in her poems. Many critics, like R. Bruce

Ward, have considered her meaning to refer to a private and spiritually rich locus for intellectual and emotive explorations of an ecstatic world: “[I]t seems likely that circumference can be equated with ecstasy when unfettered spirit, mind and feeling interact in the creative process. Feeling and form unite in the poetry to create emotionally charged metaphors that often continue reverberating in the heart after the music stops”

(63).

Probably as much can be said about most poets, although, of course, in Ward’s observation, an allusion here to Romantic ideas of transcendence appears, and like the

Romantics, Dickinson perceived a numinous quality in nature. Her influential teacher,

Edward Hitchcock, understood nature to represent the creator’s rational and scientific powers. He often convincingly explained to his young students how biology, geology, and other natural sciences were divinely sanctioned studies meant to reveal God’s manifold design for the world. Sunsets, for instance, and sunrises were analogous to divine principles “intended by God for the edification of mankind” (Wolff 93). In her case, and because she might have understood the Christian idea that real transcendence would mean a transport to heavenly ground, Dickinson could reference aspects of the natural world as a palimpsest of that perfect realm beyond her reach. As White notes:

There may exist an infinity of possible realms – Heaven itself among them – that beckon to be explored, but they never can be escaped into. The speaker can never venture beyond “circumference,” the word in this context effectively conveying the paradoxical human predicament of being both free and confined: free to explore while at the same time confined by the inescapable forces of gravity, mortality, and the limitations of individual human perception. (95) 41

Dickinson’s business of circumference is not the myopic activity of a selfish seeker, however, but rather a fully inclusive one: “My Business is Circumference” can be

“a wonderfully compact way of asserting that her poetic project embraces concerns that are relevant to the entire sphere of humanity, not just to herself" (White 91). Again, these qualities are those of poets everywhere, but such a deliberate, even obsessive business of

“circumference” is within the purview too of the sage and the seer who warrant the appellation of wisdom seeker by virtue of their intention to pass wisdom to others through the instrument of inspired words. Heaven is hid from the living; one must find the heaven of the mind. An ambiguity of substance continues to trouble her notion of an actual heaven. Dickinson is convinced of a suspect insubstantiality and vagueness to theocratic promises, which are ephemeral and shifted from any secure foundation:

Heaven is so far of the Mind-- That were the Mind dissolved-- The Site--of it--by Architect Could not again be proved--

`Tis vast--as our Capacity-- As fair--as our idea-- To Him of adequate desire No further `tis, than Here--

Here Dickinson declares Heaven to be exclusively relevant to the human mentality.

Indeed, this “Heaven” is as limitless as the most imaginative mind will allow, easily and immediately accessible without the need for supernatural mediation. Dickinson limits the orbit of her attentions to explore a world observed through the lens of religious contingency and suggests that will and desire must purchase all there can be of the 42 supernal realms. As with the Hebraic wisdom writers, a combination of secular and sacred impulses imprint her poetry:

In her religious poetry she does not hesitate to name the sovereign of this kingdom, sitting enthroned though unseen, as the soul. But while it is “Immured the whole of life” within the “magic Prison” of the flesh, she is content with a simple division of the mortal world into feeling and thought, fused as they are into “One Population,” the self. (Anderson 166)

Dickinson and Job

Biblical literature presents a figure who challenged the imperial right of God to impose upon His faithful the consequence of a terrible will. Many scholars consider the book of Job to be unique to the corpus of Wisdom literature. Unlike other wisdom books,

Job is not a collection of scriptural fragments, but rather a contiguous narrative, with recorded dialogue, and one where the rhetorical recriminations of Job to his maker are shockingly irreverent and fiery. What fruitful comparison, however, can be made between Job and Dickinson? Certainly, the relationship is not at first clear. However, when the formerly pious figure of Job alters in devotion, when suffering has dissolved his faith to an unhappy knowledge of a fierce God, then Job and Dickinson join forces as commiserators and comrades. However, similarities lie within the journeys of each, but not in their divergent destinies. While the story of Job is at least partially about reconciliation between a God who has mistreated the supplicant, and the supplicant who has chosen to challenge his God, Dickinson never withdrew from her assault on the seat of absolute power. This fact parses similarities between Job and Dickinson in this way:

Dickinson seems to have understood her rebellion against God as a principled vocation.

In other words, it was not a temporary conflict for her as it was for Job, and unlike Job, 43 there was, for Dickinson, no comfort in surrender. Instead, Dickinson martyred herself by virtue of an undeviating compulsion to confront the cosmic perpetrator of crimes against humanity. There is within the recalcitrant soul some rapturous calculus of righteous suffering which impels the rebel figure forward toward annihilation. Some sense of absolute values lies deep within Dickinson’s person: words over self, pronouncement over bliss of orthodoxy. In a letter to a friend she claimed to enjoy straying “to and fro, and walking up and down” the same as Satan who had boldly answered his imperious

Creator’s disdainful inquiry about his whereabouts.

Wolff sees in Dickinson’s admission, a singularity of will for one who chose “for herself, not the role of an accepting Job, but rather of rebellious Satan, who had challenged God’s ability to extract faith from creatures that must bear the afflictions of their terrible creator” (103). Rage and a bewildering effort to understand are traits shared by these two believers. Like Dickinson, Job at the outset of his troubles indicts God for causing the suffering of his family. Sons and daughters are crushed to death; his riches utterly ruined and depleted. Covered with boils, Job curses his God from the very center of his despairs, from the dark where he is naked and filthy:

[O]n the one hand, he wishes he might bring God Himself to trial; on the other, he ponders man-made law and its courts and declares that the transcript of his testimony ought to be inscribed permanently in stone, so that some future clansman might one day come as a vindicator, to proclaim the probity of Job's case. (Ozick 15)

Unfortunately, as Bloom adds, “this wisest of works in the Hebrew Bible grants us no comfort in accepting such wisdom” (3). The book of Job “is a structure of gathering self-awareness, in which the protagonist comes to recognize himself in relation to a

Yahweh who will be absent when he will be absent.” Similarly, Dickinson knows and 44

complains of injustice in a world where moral forces should dominate. Both Job and

Dickinson confront this issue as believers, and they yearn to understand that moral force, however mysterious and inconstant: “Indeed, the tension between divine freedom and human claims to justice pervades much more than that book, so that this single issue looms large in any significant analysis of biblical wisdom” (Bloom 3). The issue proposed here is one of propriety, honor, and conscience. It is not a doctrinal debate, but

rather one whose affiliated realities are blood and bone, and the human voice must find

the necessary medium to testify against, and to impugn, the Father for wrongdoing. It is

the word only which can deliver as a vindicator beyond the influence of God for both

Dickinson and Job:

Ultimately, Job stands firmly upon a conviction that his vindicator exists on high and will call God to task for his unfair treatment of Job. Thus he wishes that his words could be inscribed upon a rock as a permanent witness, which the umpire could use to win Job's declaration of innocence. If only Job can find God, he knows his vindication will follow, for no sinner can stand in the divine presence (Crenskaw 108).

Poem #1212 commends the word as having an enduring vitality: “A word is dead / When

it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day.” Dickinson knew that over

mortality the power of language would achieve immortality, “a retaliatory interposition of

her verse between self and God’s annihilating power (because the Voice immortalized in the verse was exempt from God’s agent, death)” (Wolff 148).

In a poem sent to her friend Samuel Bowles, Dickinson makes an intimate

admission and reveals something of her desire to lock down on the simplicity she felt

lacking at the pulpit: “We told you we did not learn to pray—but then our freckled bosom bears its friends—in its own way—to a simpler sky.” The drama plays out in the mind, 45

beyond the power of God: “But when all Space has been beheld / And all dominion

shown / The smallest Human Heart’s extent / Reduces it to none” (P1162). Letters and poems support Dickinson’s admission that she had never learned to pray. Instead, she communed with what she called the “Being’s Center.” Poetry as well does not satisfy a need for answers about the dilemma of human interaction with the divine. As wisdom

writer, Dickinson established a platform from which to declaim, a location between a

reader and a speculative author from which contrary truths could be examined.

Like Dickinson, Job in his agony becomes both believer and atheist, atheist in the

sense that he cannot logically explain the God of his current circumstance: “God's

presence is incontrovertible; God's moral integrity is nil. And how strange: in the heart of

Scripture, a righteous man impugning God!” (Ozick 112). Who dares to scrutinize the

Master Architect? Who accuses? Dickinson and Job are both subject to their vacillating

agendas. Job condemns his God, yet pleads pitifully for relief and restoration to faith.

Dickinson clearly condemns God, but also clearly yearns for a providential God of justice

and love. Both represent wisdom of experience, as ambivalent as it might be, and both are

fully qualified to speak, as each does eloquently, for those who suffer unjustly in a

divinely sponsored world. Dickinson was thoroughly committed, as Wolff points out, “to

examine the notion of Heaven with rigor and to achieve some comprehensive

understanding of the Almighty Being Who waits to receive us after death.” (323)

Alter notes how “Job is a fictional character, as the folktale stylization of the

introductory prose narrative means to intimate. In the rounds of debate with the three

Friends, poetry spoken by fictional figures is used to ponder the enigma of arbitrary

suffering that seems a constant element of the human condition” (World 188). 46

Dickinson’s earlier poem quoted above proposes, “Heaven is so far of the Mind” that the death of the mind means a death of Heavenly obsessions and, by extension, the death of

God. For the desperate and anguished Job remedy exists in the annihilation of self: “The

intolerable point of culmination is followed not, as in Psalms, by a confident prayer for

salvation but by a death wish, whose only imagined relief is the extinction of life and

mind, or by a kind of desperate shriek of outrage to the Lord” (World 188).

Interestingly, Job’s state of affairs, his unfair treatment, his anger and outrage, are

not poured into the ear of God, but rather presented to men, whom Job expects to identify

and commiserate with him. Of course, this does not happen; the series of dialogues

between Job and his three friends provides the author an opportunity to develop his point.

Out of the whirlwind the Lord speaks: “Shall he that contended with the Almighty

instruct him/ he that reproveth God, let him answer” (Job 40: 2). It will not be the

Almighty to reason with a man of faith, and it is precisely at this juncture in the story that

Job’s anger and self-pity fall away. He answers: “Behold, I am vile; What shall I answer

thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth. / Once I have spoken; but I will not answer;

yea, twice; but I will proceed no further” (Job 40: 3, 4). God will not be judged, nor will

He be second-guessed. A theocratic order has no justice system. Job accepts that the good

and the wicked will suffer together: “If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the

trial of the innocent. / The earth is given into the hand of the wicked: he covereth the

faces of the judges thereof; if not, where, and who, is he?” (Job 9: 23, 24). A stunned

realization of actualities makes Job sick of heart. There are to be no reprieves, and, in

fact, no justice. Job understands that there is no relief from troubles when Absence

consumes his prayers. Obedience means compliance, de facto. “Shall mortal man be 47

more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker?”(Job 4:18) Job asks. The

terrifying affirmative fact is that indeed man is more just and more compassionate than

the God of Old Testament literature. What choice, but to submit?

Several places in the book of Job indicate a desperate fleeing, or a wish to avoid

the constant glare of jealous scrutiny as tribulation sent from the throne of the Maker

cannot be outrun. Job says: “Thou huntest me as a fierce lion” (Job 10:16), “he runneth upon me like a giant” (Job 16: 14), “Know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net” (Job 19: 6). As Job knew, Dickinson knew: a lawless Master reigns high in the world and other humane but lesser gods are effectively nullified, a fact noted in the final two stanzas of poem #1260:

If “God is Love” as he admits We think that he must be Because he is a “jealous God” He tells us certainly

If “All is possible with” him As he besides concedes He will refund us finally Our confiscated Gods-- (33-40)

My contribution to a general list of ontological concerns is neither unique nor

original. We believe that essentially, collectively, humans conjoin because of a shared

experience. Art can impose a satisfying commentary, but the endeavor of artifice is not

one to enforce a change in the world. Rather, poems and all the other means by which

people express the unsettled conscience, or the mind assaulted by incomprehensible

realities, merely observe and report. Of course, didacticism and dogmatism are reflected

through art as well, but they produce an unpleasant result. Perhaps in the telling of things,

those things we know already, the register of terrors or joys is enough. Certainly we grow 48 wise with ineluctable experience, so the oblique glance at dread, or the whispered word, are intimacies of a tender regard for our need to understand.

Slow Dissolve

Ancient, the mountain presses to the flattened plains— enormity is the middle-word for haunt.

The sun boils down into the hills: wines and lavenders of evening, always unkempt to the sky's weak sight.

A fine clutter of land grows less delicate until nearly at once it is simple with lines of dark forms on a soft Braille.

Stars turn out individually on time while the breeze rings a clean quiet through uncountable grasses.

There's no story here, Mother, no sense except the warps and flurries of time are probably that swelling vacancy I call confusion,

from which I can't stop hoping to sense a single, first, clear word. 49

Part Two: Saving Appearances 50

San Diego A. A.

I have a problem. I used to like to go to the park, drink a little wine. But, my life was lonely.

I begged God. I said to Him:

I know, Father, you can save me. You can give me what I need to make my life good, so that I don’t have to moan to myself all the time, so I don’t drink myself sick anymore. You can give me what I need and I need a relationship.

I thought that was what I needed, someone to love. Then, like a miracle, three days later up comes a beautiful girl— a beautiful Indian girl with long black hair. Dark. She is only twenty-seven and I am an old man. When I saw this, I said, Madre del Dios! This I can’t handle. But, she will not go away. I tell her so many times, Just go away, please. You must go. But she stays.

I do not know what to do. There is no sex; nothing like that. She comes to my house and showers, then goes to my bed.

I sleep on the couch. I have bad dreams. She is there, her face like a vision. Beautiful. But this vision torments me. I worry all the time about her, where she is, what she is doing. It hurts me, so I tell her she must leave.

What can I do? God has blessed me, but cursed me too. I need a way out so that I can be alone again, but not kill myself, and not drink anymore, and not worry for a woman to make me happy. 51

Tools

Put them away. Keep tools clean with new grease, Grease like brass-honey, And oilcloth, Box and shelter.

Take care to use each for the other, So the whole collection adheres to Ideas of policy and procedure.

Make each tool ready, and beautiful too. As perfect as the photograph Renders the pleasure of permanence, so well.

Then they will remain as they should remain: Made to outlast the maker, And the worker. Artfully built and designed

To indicate what might be In a worker to do; His best efforts half-near-done With good clean tools.

This is what the grandparents say, what they always say about tools, about keeping things right: You can always change the plans when the tools are good and ready.

True as true, we say. Right as rain. 52

The Sell

Whitefield Cosmetic's Lily Greasecomb set up shop in Silo California at the El Sol Motel to sell the wives some make-up.

While their earthmen worked the fields they joined in a lot under a tree. There was a card table and paper tablecloth and on that table was make-up.

Lily used her words carefully: with spatial gestures she split her speech using still verbs and hissing syllables.

Soon, Lily had them wearing lipstick called "Hot Hearts." Looking like ghosts they danced to the radio with a thick gleam above each eye. 53

Saving Appearances

When Night got sick, they laid his moon carefully on the mantle and brought out the big tools. It was hard to say what exactly was the matter except that he was unexpectedly thin; enough so that he had lately dropped a few shiners into the sea more absent-mindedly than usual.

So, they were going to make him better and decided to disregard at all costs that ghoulish nature of his against which so many rage and complain.

With clinical decorum, the specialists too overlooked the normally offensive odor of dire moistness, which the patient exhaled with pitiful difficulty.

His wonderfully dark skin was flayed at the vaporous thigh of Hercules. And from the incision, a startling locale: a green heart, a red hour, a jet Braille of shades.

Sadly, just a little trickle of ink drooled from his last dark hour almost like an afterthought.

So the dark side still has a sense of the sublime, the chief surgeon exclaimed respectfully. It's not all carbon and secrecy there, not all underside of illumination through and through.

I have suspected the devil not to be such a mean drunk after all. He has the heart of a soldier. His fans and advocates watched for long hours without deviation the special report on the CBS Nightly News to get a hint of what was afoot.

Oh, there was much discussion, of course, much praise and condemning admiration about the great pontiff of jazz and assassination who once so magnificently practiced his cool habits: waiting till daybreak to amble home, 54

palming the eight-ball of lost-sight, drinking a cold ether to his dark sisters—while the cad stubbed out the minds of countless sleepers with poppy-bloom.

Don't sew the gypsy in, someone advised the team of surgeons, but do, please, abrogate the moan.

Oh well, added one invidious doctor, if we're going to make some surgery, some alteration, let me just tickle out the little toy crescent of circumstance that would have us fearing this thug forever. After all, here's some good that rims the blood bruise.

Was it not once on Night's wordless watch that the angel came to announce the Carpenter who, when older and wiser, took refuge in Night's black faculties in an olive grove?

Much was said in his defense, much clemency offered to shade the bright blame with a touching spirit of real concern. But as the world would have it, these mercies were soon looted so that justice again found its terms and held true. Death's flying-emblem opened, as clean as a fridge-light, one ghostly white eye and died.

What was left was done. They put him back on his trundle and wheeled him around the ugly waist of the world, not telling anyone that hope was gone.

And placed with a sad conspiracy his fool's-gold moon at the loose core of his lap and arranged with sorrow his perfect gross of liquid stars, while wishing all the while their hatreds were different. 55

Still Life

And a figure. Something young, Desirable, plain to view. One familiar, looking back. Curious.

A few hundred times I’ve been there, Fern, sedge and thorn, light, Life-matter And a white house with busted sills.

And an oak, pond, Thick grass, cream sky high This way, as before— Last June— When a full-moon brimmed round to the cup.

You should want to kiss a few loves well. Just a few minutes. Smell of the whole talking, turning.

Blue broken door And gable stove-in at the ridgeline swale. On the rail, who? Who minds the place? Antique droll eventualities all. It isn’t a lived-in house.

Place your I-knows at impossible ends: The dead and the to-be. A fall of celestializations and pond

Where each moon hisses out its fact And dimples the once for the echo. 56

What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor?

You might want to take him home, have him standing in your kitchen as the sun comes up.

There he’d be. Simple as that—a bit pitiful, maybe.

But he’s handsome, right? And he makes you laugh without even trying.

There’d be everything about travel in the way he’d stub a cigarette into your mother’s good cup.

And how amazed you’d be to see how quickly he fixed the old car.

There’s something tender in the word that says how he could make you feel.

But, you can’t take him home. Coal-fires burn at the root of his thirst.

All he will want is to get drunk, fall down and sleep just as pleased as a little baby. 57

The Church Where I Go Has No Idols

They were removed, sold, says a plaque, sometime in nineteen-twelve.

We have ourselves and heaven, I was told—

one summer night under the arch of the open door— by Brother Rowland.

And what do we need with those marble doodads? he asked, in fun.

That’s for Christendom, the old garlanded whore. For you,

I have a hand, which he presented as if to help me up and away from my question.

Remember, this is the hand that gives. The other, gathers.

Then, I think he would have winked,

had he not caught the possible impropriety. 58

Snow Blind

I try many things carefully try them as one might test an untested weight weighing

no strain with purpose and care with great care the way one might this early hour try the neighbor's door

But I don't do anything really

I stand here It's winter All has been done about trees already The dark chatter of their forms is cliché

And sky and day above What can be said?

High and white as a clock-face when the time comes for snow

Snow falls The first flakes sting

But I'm not surprised Not again

Nor will I regret leaving to get warm leaving to stand at my window

to wonder about the place where I turned away 59

Moon Talk

Themes about the moon have tricked people Into blood feuds. Got people to sucking at late hours. Kept people up— Created legends of howling people Affected by the moon and shot in the dark By a terrified farmer.

In various parts of the country— All affected by the moon, Affected by its evil light— People have pursed lips and wondered:

When Will it stop Its steady stare?

When it goes away, It reappears, Unremittingly.

About the moon the grandfathers say:

The moon is a thief; bread for dreamers; A fiery block-stone; Reveling, whip-scarred bloom.

It curses with hope the unlucky. Old men.

Unmoved sad haters-of-night.

For those emptied, The moon is a pock, A silver sore, A scab of powder and ash.

The moon turns a blonde blue And the moon sends a young man to the cliffs On his twenty-eighth year.

60

Grandmothers soothe on moony nights. To the children they say: It can’t not hurt you no ways. Blue-moon is like the sea; blue like a Hot bright sky—chrome when you swing highest. And just when you nearly loop over, That joy, children, is moon-blue.

Real, and not real too, The moon must be silver. Honest as a coin. 61

The Magnificent Ninety

They were only ninety men, I said. This, the argument between us.

Caravels! Our bedroom deadened the word.

Small Portuguese venture-ships, untested, but designed to discover Atlantic trade routes, Honey.

What ninety men would ride those boats? The question, was argument.

And how far are you going to drag this? she asked.

Ninety men. The small caravels.

Ninety men. The small caravels.

Those ships were Portuguese venture-ships, I urged, meant to chart south every inlet and shore, but so small.

The Great Navigator sent them beyond the Bulging Cape, maybe to their deaths, and when they returned, merchants, politicians, and scholars sent them farther.

What did any of them care about sailors? She undressed darkly.

Did they care about those men? I asked her strange form. She gave me a look that said Come to bed.

Then, tired, I whispered: I’m drunk, but I love you.

She wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t. And I envied her her complacence. She sank fast and slipped away.

Those ships, . . . man. Portuguese voyagers . . . Cape Bojador . . .ventures, I mumbled. 62

Ninety men. Small caravels.

I locked up, Sat next to our chest-of-drawers— one sock half on— and stared at the darkness of our room.

While she slept so well, what could I do, but wait for morning?

I knew how I’d feel then. Private. Smug. Those guys were heroes!

I would have the dark alone. Then, above the palette, behind the eyes, like a sneeze coming on, Pity pushed up a monumental mood.

Brother, I said, and meant it. 63

Penal Drift

I dreamed, Will, our getaway, son, a damned goody to fly, with a mermaiden figurehead bare bust to bowels, skin to scales, on the gouge of a vision-boat, with bright-work, brag-work, fresh stoned decks and a woman onboard.

I dreamed up the woman aboard our No ‘Rithmetic, boy, who we’ll make a naked mother, a tending bare blanca, our Española whore.

She’s one hairy woman, Will. A gullet-bloomed wretch who’ll serve up whatever on green-hour'd dog-watches, when doldrums starch flat the running black seas, when the moon has greased its watery eye with cirrus swarming like flu-smokes do deep in the hands of towns.

I dreamed us, brother, as thieves of that woman who’d asked for better but who fell hard at the trail of her tempers to ride red wishes like a wild fool, while glutting her prospects on luck tough as nuts.

I wanna pull the strands of her obsessions for rest with my dirty promise to cut her throat one day.

In the French, we’ll name her Drowned Fool.

Let’s play the whole stage of it, Will, and see it full-volume: the bark-chips of islands in the soft chalks of dusk; the blue milks of our wake boiling off into history. And when we strike-below to hunch to our sleeps, the timbers will groom their steady complaints to drift us farther into fancy rites.

We’ll have him too, yes. Your bird-of-a-brute punch-lucky Jack. A blade of rage’ll turn through his days as we up-talk his midnight gelding: 64

Don’t overstate the take, I say, but talk-up the wealth of what’ll remain to be hauled aft over the pumpkin reef. We’ll name him Man

And you, Chaplain-Will, can hold service on the poop at eight bells and hold over hard about that genesis of sins: the human heart.

But for me to strike fresh while the fires are hot, the two-fisted boilers will knuckle-up hard and make good every tin-knock and shiver, and blow to the stars a bone-quaking blast to have all of us tasting the smoke we’ll ride.

The woman will choose what the water must bury, and you, if you like, can drown yourself, Will, but I see myself playing smart in the century,

riding the spillers and making way fast for the first last vestige of real decency. 65

Slow Dissolve

Ancient, the mountain presses to the flattened plains— enormity is the middle-word for haunt.

The sun boils down into the hills: wines and lavenders of evening, always unkempt to the sky's weak sight.

A fine clutter of land grows less delicate until nearly at once it is simple with lines of dark forms on a soft Braille.

Stars turn out individually on time while the breeze rings a clean quiet through uncountable grasses.

There's no story here, Mother, no sense except the warps and flurries of time are probably that swelling vacancy I call confusion,

from which I can't stop hoping to sense a single, first, clear word. 66

Someday, Thunder

I am going to keep walking into and away from the east, the north, south and west

I will breathe right up to the last I will touch your face with kisses and stare dead-center into your eyes

And what grows will grow as green as crayon until the harvest comes gold to wave politely in the breeze

We will eat what bread and mash our bed with sex and thick sleepiness

The night will not abandon its course in the world or lessen its average for cooling the country grass The years will come

And once for perfection naked in the pearl twilight, pearl dusk red shadows white shades over the dark olive hills you'll proffer your palms to a lighted rain

and thunder will flower Your flesh will smoke with age A scent of sour rind at your merchant belly The once-red rose of your hair gone with

gray light

You'll move from our union to finish —martyr

And all beings will move like froth into and away from living until we are all joined on one side or the other of all we thought we knew 67

Volunteers

There needed be gardens at our big church. There needed be beauty made risen from nothing: New sod and roses, planters made straight, A lime and three figs, And commonsense taste about statuary.

Our church where we meet had a plain need for perfect. Lilies too. So it was.

And my husband, I, my son—for Him We sweated; we scoured the soil Clean of weeds and made glory A place to bear witness. There needed be gardens

And so it was. It needed to be for God-glory there.

And no friend could pass and not know what we did, Not know how we volunteered quickly to beautify. We chose to transform dishevelment:

Each disordered bramble we forced back in place, As likewise does He the troublesome will, the contrary heart. 68

Enough North

Far enough north the growing of our good land of earning stops as a final tide. There we enter strong enough. Strong enough So our trying makes right our labors To purchase pride and our will from their lacking.

If there are bears there are bears we will murder. Or the falling heights, which might crumble our trails, We will study to defeat. And that dark man, that woman, that child, Dark as the woods are dark, Are just the suffering sign we must suffer. Their circumstance has wrought them so, Burning a blaze from which we run to our fires hot and calm.

No farther north than what keen-cut line marks our full resolve To step another notch up to that country of winds. Faith holds the time before the voice flies from our saying What words we reserve for sighting the hard fear that once dim, lights.

Where are the temperatures for swimming? And the green grasses of hot hues? The brown packets of soft land in our pictures, of what land we had? There is a story, too. An endpoint pricking the white skins of skies It runs finer to a future where town's tolling bells would dink out and rattle the blue clots of dropped snow

At places we would have lived if there were ever to be building done.

Instead, we chop-block the lens of glass-waters at our feet, And build our homes of water, Where each has a hole for coming and going and for watching The shades that flutter the mile Where the south too will be soon to close in. 69

Valentine's

I see that lovers at windows evoke an essence of breath and brick of frame and oil.

I see the red hearts on napkins puffed with color shining up like apples and a whisper creaks within.

I have seen it in cafes with whirling wood-blade fans fluttering above our little group.

I have seen it at Valentine's when I look down under my glass, where water cuts tissue, and again that creak. 70

Out There

Even before the first doubt, your story has begun.

The engine’s shot, you’re out of the car, turning in place, hand cupped over your eyes. You see the sun, how white and hot and high, and the far away rumpled mountains bunched at the desert’s edge.

You won’t see what you hope to see. No one ever comes so far.

The brakes have stopped smoking before you realize how close you are to the drop.

Can you spot the old wreck? All the way down. A 50-something Plymouth.

It feels great to be alive, so you spend a few minutes deep-breathing lots of warm dry air, and you notice everything to be lit so fine, the light on your feet and feeling those feet so wonderfully snug in your shoes. It’s too much; it’s wonderful. But, there are those doubts to address. You’re alone.

Can’t cheat. Can’t wake up somewhere else. No one’s going to bail you out or give you his best advice. The wind can’t help, of course, but you do sense it knows something. The only words a wind can offer chill you and merely rattle the creosote a little.

If you were suddenly to turn to salt and blow away, who would know?

You want to discover how today you’re made of iron, and this’ll be a good one to tell anytime. 71

A couple of cans of soda up front, some leftover wine in the trunk.

There’s a long walk ahead and afternoon’s slipping fast.

This is good, this story of yours. Don’t worry about its meaning. Really.

You’ll see. Tonight that sky will split wide open. Then a million pin-lights will go clattering over the void, just for you. 72

Gifts

Think again, lovers. Love love.

The little stars have sent the purest light God has for us,

have every night shellacked a hard light— a difficult light over mosques and churchyards

Love love and love being loved.

With every breath, believe.

Faith, you will one day send to night who does not need anyone. 73

Night Light

It's this Day again, and I have decided to keep it near enough tonight

that I will glide through bad dreams— with a whole sweet yellow afternoon at my shoulder— glazing my shoulder with light.

So I will peer with humor and smart contempt at the razor-slice, the bruise-green-strangulation.

Tomorrow, when Day comes to meet itself, I won't need to introduce them. They will touch like lovers what palms Days have and for the first time get to know what they are.

And then, after Night has again indulged its selfish threat, I will ask it to forgive my demonstrated power, ask for mercy for trying to do the impossible, for trying to escape with light up the well from my just deserts. 74

The Very Very Goodness of Acting

The best of all stories I’ve seen are the drunks I know, their lives, their being drunk when it’s easy to be savage or to weep for love, either one. The picture is the story and it begins before any one of us knows it.

There is, for example, art in one’s wearing jeans, leather, cotton, and standing on a gray cement pier at a cold harbor, one foot propped on a mushroom-capped steel bollard, shrugging to stay warm, blowing the last smoke high and being smart about it.

Drinking too much is good for feeling sexy, for feeling sure of the right facts: knowing the great sky has its own blue that all seers share, sensing a swale of round seconds raining through time with everyone in it, like someone’s watching, someone great and secret, watching.

Who could expect any better dalliance of a poise already a perfect form at the harbor? The remarkable grace of hands, those future troubles embodied in the shrug and proven across the shoulders, the evident expressions of a willingness to build everything on risk.

Because attenuation whittles all details finer, brightens light, and makes murk of shades, drinking brings on a special drama. Self-conscious attenuation is the very, very, goodness of acting through plots born to true the swayed histories of life, convincingly.

If there really is, as suspected, romance in frailty, then what a love the world has for those visiting the harbor alone to try their talks, or for those who float into the day each careful circumstance meant to fix what’s current and desperate.

But so many decent plans get schemed up and let go or, dangerously even, get played out edgy without losing force until the devil breaks loose and smokes through everything. Courage. Courage to live tall-tales.

Whatever. It takes a drink to brace up for what drinking does, lots of them, years of beers for real heart. The struggle is dignified though and worthy of a boozer’s full supplication to any responsive power to restore, because there’s one way to see it: loss is a rich fuel for burning what remains, but oh such a flame to see. 75

Naming a Place of Need

I was Knowing;

I, Man-knowing.

Words: of one tongue. One mind.

Ghost like a river in my limbs. And gold for the pollinated light.

I gazed the fixed heavens to make claims.

Jasmine, scented Lily, anointed my clay bed. Day—smart wish in Monkey’s eyes.

* I named the place of making. Walking pressed down the grasses.

Green, every tree. Bamboo. Mango.

* Souls of earth; of air. All appointed the gift, Hiddekel.

Red for terrapin-eye. White-spirit moving.

Souls of water. Given Euphrates.

* Words, made of knowing: Signs-of-my-breathing.

I AM, Peacock, Monkey.

Lapis—no clouds. Light. 76

White air moving. Fragrant Cedar. Whale. Worm. And all and last, Desire.

Guava I ate; Hiddekel I drank.

Guava I tasted. Euphrates poured down.

Date-palm, Water-light and Serpent, Said to me of Hunger.

* I AM spoke: I know you, Walking, Naming, Eating.

In that speaking, That sleeping.

I know you Walking, Naming, Eating.

Through all sense fell stars’ black country.

Who will now know your knowing?

* I did not wake.

The figure chimed. Fine. Still. The Man called Woman: Her flesh and spirit.

Her words.

All named things she knowing.

Tree of life. Tree for knowing. 77

Transworld

What would Buddha do? What would anyone great do with what you’ve made of things so far? Save the day? Easy for someone who can keep it simple.

But who are you this morning? You are this one, aren’t you? Embarrassed, humiliated. Bad drunk. Last night worse than usual.

Look at yourself, God help you. Your head crunching closed, half blind. The sag of the stomach lifting itself to wretch.

What would Buddha do? Drunken Buddha? Everclear truth—his open palm— to know the nothing that will not fly away. Why will it always be so difficult to know simple?

The only real simple you know has left few obvious marks: Your father died, alone, in a hotel. A good friend caught his last right in front of you.

No-nonsense blood-smears. A couple of burl-knots fixed on memory in the something you are.

To begin, you must try to listen with the fingers. Cold rain weeping the nails.

Work inward to the real-self, the seat of full-regard, still intact despite. And there you are, wide sky filled with a clean sheet of rain,

in Thailand of all places, 78

watching a jewel-bug creep the curb stones. Like a cosseted creature you are free to move under stellar light in a realm of grace. And in your best clothes, pretty filthy now, you’re waiting for a cab. Just a moment.

Aloneness, sweetness, cold.

Just for a moment the All-Other proffers a scintilla of itself. Aloneness sweet and cold and true.

South Carolina scrub-pines, the farmhouse and she. Simplicity arrives from the states.

Who loves you?

And who you love becomes that picture you hold, her eyes looking back at your absurd condition.

Who is it that sees in you a master, even of so many things of small consequence?

Gives full-credit, full-value? A super-shot in the arm?

You know what seeing becomes, back through the threshold of seeing. Something you send for and so, and hence, arrives like before, again. 79

Believing the Difference Matters

I haven't yet had my idea of life spoiled by serious illness. Perhaps this is a stupid statement, but the thought seemed logical and poetic as I drove home from work late this afternoon and saw all the old things in a different way.

Fall maples flared more intensely in the six o`clock sun while oncoming cars glowed their colors like candies. And the pass between Athens and The Plains— once a graceful hill blown out to make a road when I was maybe twenty and living in California— reformed its ancient ridge whole again.

How would I have known as a young man that I'd see those rock walls at forty-six under a clear sky and think of dying? Mortality can't ruin an evening like the one I had planned tonight.

But tonight is different too. There's a quarter moon in a black sky over my yard. It floats; it appears fresh washed; it's high and cold and says to me something difficult I know about myself. I've been trying to fool a dying friend.

She has so much cancer it's unseemly. It's wrong for me to see it like this; her blood is filthy with disease and maybe because I'm scared, it's all right for me to be haunted

and disgusted too by her struggle to move through her house, point by point, from the sofa to the bathroom to the bedroom, bravely floating her strengths above the gravity of these dangerous days in a world that will bury her, sure.

Because I've seen it before in another friend twenty years ago, I know when someone dies slowly this way the animal keeps kicking. People see it as fighting to live, but it seems purely organic to me. That animal won't stop beating the bars until it has pulverized the will to run. And then, when the personality remembers its old perfect honesty, 80

everything familiar drops beyond humor and complexities into a hole.

Well, hypocrisy, in this case, is kind and does some good over the phone when I pretend. I fool myself to be earnest. Maybe what I want will swim up from the dark; I want it to surprise me.

But phrasing up hope seems a sort of necessary stupidity. I say the things I wish for because I love; love exists and must be rewarded, sometimes. And if there's love, there's beauty. And then, of course, I must believe in the beauty I felt this afternoon. I would go crazy otherwise.

But this belief is similar to what I learned as a kid cutting school then sneaking up to watch how things were unchanged by my mischief. It sort of hurts, but the strange misery of it feels like growing up and understanding what no one can say.

Maybe having faith means believing in what it is I like to think: that our best hope is to look ahead without fear. To accept what can’t be changed. After all, who knows what good will come from future dangers, or of how blessed we’ll be someday to die? 81

Autumn Out

Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye—1 Corinthians 15: 51-52

Want. Word lit white stationed intimately at the enormity point, is autumn.

And need. Writ through the air-foliate falls a correspondence as rain that patters the nerves.

Of the autumn-country, signs burn tidally. Each tree-abdomen drinks up the outage of loss. A supping of inevitable passing

that utterly untrees with church blue winds a pack of hues from optimist-green.

See somebody waking. Like you? Fifty and more autumns and more. One expansive means stubbed in.

The shock-white, salt, snow, light-flashed, glaze anodizes the bed, the walls.

Fossils.

The plain-dealing depths of that home. Then time-to-get-up lit in parching chrome. 82

In the East

And I never thought about that evermore, then when I stood near the foreign tree, minding my plastic tank as it whined in the dirt I had set in its path. And when the batteries were still new I decided to get that harmonica lying like a silver pointer in an adult key. And I went when I knew it was not the time to go. But, there were no soldiers and the dirt had mounded up into boring hum of toy-crush while the cicadas rasped under a three o'clock sun.

On the stair I stepped up confident; an air of sin had tensed beneath my tracks. No harmonica played. I tapped at the door like someone calling someone to death, and there was the dust-filled pause when I was ten, and the Philippines a mystery of careful lovers, and in the pause the harsh tiny jangle of manly-buckle, and in the dying the laugh of three two seven four three two seven.

When the door opened to the hall and me, there was man and there was woman and there the awful belly of things grinding with a force I did not understand. Me, a boy, hand out, fingers spread, wrist deep into that two-thirty affair.

And I got my toy and went out into the sun to blow a high and empty reed.

But, I was good. I played "Red River Valley" and stared out over the diamond rocks neatly set at the harbor and gave a child's sigh.

I switched on the new and terrible dreaming whine and saw, while holding the thing belly-up, rubber treads moving in that forward fashion. 83

While the sun baked the back of my neck I said, "You're all right."

When the rustle of the palms startled me, I sang the tune I could not play. I had no soldiers to kill and the batteries wore down burring in mystery electric. I had waited; day moved an inch. I dug my toe into the earth and with my belly stilled like new varnish I called out "Mom" up the stippled concrete stairwell, but I called with the resolution of dead cells so it wouldn't do. I worked up three notes on my harmonica while the cicadas sang and filled my hot hair with burring electric.

The next day was the pig roast. Such weirdness when the foreign boys led me to the water. I was so white.

They laughed. But then a certain intensity smiled up. Asking me in very poor English: "What do you call your pee pee?" 'Dick,' I replied. They said buto and swapped gum and saltseeds and looked at me as if I were a wet penis in the water of their familiar sea. The jungle trees bent over the beach as if scolding, and I laughed standing in the heel holes of beach.

I went back to the roasting pig and the Filipino fathers and the high hot flames and the cool yellow beer and dirty-talk of sailors with blue tattoos who spoke masterfully with the women who somehow pointed to the hot flames.

The little brown women of gold teeth and penny dresses grew very serious under the sand trees, removed, it seemed, from the open-toed fun of pig-eating sailors. One stroked her cheek while her glance shot over her shoulder and then I knew they were eaters too and that they would mesh when the sun went down in the bug-hum of their hot, foreign world.

Oh God, I thought, after the coals had collapsed and I had had my pig tusk: 84

This sweating place of rubbery plants and sweating, helmeted, war is a wondrous place and I was caught by the truth I had seen in the eyes of women and men.

But, I did not cry. I turned for a moment to the golden sea and I saw that many things would be a door,

and there would be hangers banging ashamedly on cheap knobs in the land, in the sea. And I saw something too smooth between the legs of my soldier men. I crushed the turtle shell of my tank one day. It lay vulnerable to the butt of my bat. Its batteries were long gone; I had used them to bomb the roots of jungle trees where my rubber men lay hiding: one without a hand, one whole, one missing in the careless jungle. 85

The Picture of Frank

If Frank could do it, well Frank was glad to have done just so. If we ask the ball with fizz-water for signs, a trim male lover will drift over and peer too at what losses he had, at the life he wished for and tried to destroy.

Remember us, us two? You and me down at the sea for a day, and did we get all wet? Dirty and terrible? Hot afternoon, I recall, and later that night by the fire there wasn’t a single star overhead, just dim cloud-works, and our clothes were red and the sand was dark and the wind seemed to have a bitter color, the girls burned their thin hands at the flames, and you became most sullen of any.

Drift away from that. Think. How many touched the healer? How many knew him and was he heroic to avoid the flesh? I can invent an answer and the really funny thing, I could nail the truth of it, be right and never know. In fact, we’ve all been right and wrong in two columns a specific number of times. Did your good friends, like mine, fear their

own perditions and did they learn from them? Because contrary values can teach people what they need to survive. My God, it could be worse, and has been I suppose. Better to just rattle around a lot with our gambler’s odds to see how it works out, to maybe manage later the outcome so

nothing too outlandish gets caught on the page as a revelation of the very worst secrets, yours or mine.

I’ll guess you were just so, a certain way I’ve thought of you. But I see all the blocks of funny words you wrote and those pages and patterns make me feel like reading and they give me a kind of comfort like you wished for and received because you were smart and accomplished and very talented. Pictures don’t say enough, forget the adage because there’s just you in black and white with your cat. 86

Sleep

I don't think it's something I've made up or imagined:

the very best people are wondering.

Alone before their terrors their dreads. Accountable.

These people doubt and they are my very good friends because together we understand the confusion of life and the treachery of sleep's false harbors.

We are all like this, really, a little at least or a lot. All of us.

And we question, don't we, good people,

what imperfect gamble has been made with our world.

The animal, sleep, abides us; we nurse its black dram: the subtle declination below the rim, the olive shades of shadows there

~ And there is no able comfort consistent with our need. We blaze with pain and pleasure and rise blind as a star.

May I ask? About clean reality? Its sharp lines and tactile contours? The fields of thoughts in faces? The brittle light of the corruptible sun? 87

What about that indeed?

I want to kiss the hard neck of a real world. But what I want I fear, since these will not fail to lead us all, friends, to the least desirable dream. 88

Doubtful Stamina

October's off-season at Lake Jim, But whoever she was, she was out for sun that day, and naked.

Will and I were only trying to see, just a little, When the skiff swamped, fast.

Down went the motor, rods, and beer. It was goddamned cold.

We got near froze and were swimming like fetchers. Then Will cramped.

"Jeff! S’gone now. Spooned up a demon here." He said that to me, like an old Bible Hebrew. He said it, like that.

Not a sound before; I could see he was blue. How could he joke? The idiot!

And that's wide-water to the south end. Pretty bad. And then rain. Still, I saw plain enough Will was fighting.

And how she was thinking. Or a hard sleep sort of pinned her down. Flat on the beach. All that cold. She never moved.

Deep water can ruin all logic, I think, and two men aren't worth much, maybe.

When a hard gust cut into the trees on shore, they leaned on their heels; chattered like static.

And Will was gone, without a fault, as I knew him. I pictured poor Will on the mud.

What was his posture? I wanted to know how his body burned with cold. But that's no matter.

Now, I think, when the danger eases and summer returns, full-a1ive but always on the move, I'll still be a sucker. 89

Puncture

When the sun dies the stars will dock their lights to darkness. Flavors will diffuse and forms burn. Every life will compress its string of benign modules down beyond a point

to a puncture—a wound through a healing ether— to the bright side of blindness where a romance of wanting will have the promise to grow. 90

Amanuensis

Heaven made all works and named them. Then hands, created for swarming every earth form.

I know how spirits work too, how they drop fast to their stations before each prophet, wings hunched

and restless, while playing the scripted vision, advancing progress more forward still.

The only one Meister, Vallhallic householder and lord of those broad-backs who spin all stars,

promotes the essential craft, the one punishing guild. I see in my room, at the advent of yellow ethers,

of fire lit clouds blue as muscle, reasons to do only what the one Beauty urges.

Messengers appear listing those practical night-orders. I see, in dreams, reasons to apprentice.

The things I do, are they not vital? My hands fit their tools

as well as they are able and, always filled, are not ever emptied.

What the will must suffer others for glory, my hand will always mean to do. 91

Black

Doubt is first to turn gold. Embarrassment, miscellanies, the tenor of frights and all jovian virtues shimmer clean of their values.

Trouble draws legs in tightly. The slow voltage of its going flares. Its single finished calorie, A private light, yours alone.

Last-light veers. Wobbles. Closes off. Piquant worries— of definements undressed finally — strewn past the round horizon.

Thought feeds knowing to the world. Then mystery’s famous gesture says: Come-dead-center-to-me. 92

Late Walk

big red truck green grass white farmhouse

cutting between the hills an eggshell blue a man just has to lean on his liquor

getting through the prayer line walking fields with all colors

flaring soft or fired with hard light the walnut shell his face is

the tan smeared wet greasy eyes a most mature man out of time

behind that pretty wandering through shreds of veiling clouds

beyond the altitudes a whole empty country

the derelict twin of his early power man's mind moves

towing what waits to tag along through a dissolving season

tough cut grass hard brown boots bigger sky each swallow 93

Come Glory

In the glory we rise and stopper ourselves to heaven and bliss—our bodies

shed, worry obsolete, death, laughter, dread.

But today, each day, moves its nightline on the world

over Paris & Troy, over even small Sunnyvale.

But then, come Rapture, today, this day even grit-blasted ghost-towns will empty their desiccate perished.

Roots of afternoon? Euthanized. Little town, rutted road, the gray dream gone.

Who is spared the culling glows nimbus like blooms, lest the gardener lifts our heads. Then,

we’re through. 94

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