“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
These are the only ways I know it.
Is there any other way?”
— Emily Dickinson,
Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1870) in The Letters of Emily Dickinson
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oh, let’s say 1000 times,
have I read this,
always nodding, always agreeing,
but not necessarily
smiling, laughing
even my nod is doggedly varied,
some,
fiercely bobbing up and down,
as if to assure myself,
my poetic head is still securely and yet attached!
some,
an ever so slight tilting, lilting
modest swaying side to side,
for the recognition of the
emotional
hit,
is
softly softly perceived,
an all knowing, in-full-agreement
deep socket eyed glinting of comprehension
for rare bird
is the poem that just
is plainly read, dispatched, eliciting a
chain reaction
negligible
but,
MY GOD,
when the chest is bested,
split and sundered,
lips sputtering,
hairs Gumby electrified,
hands releasing the tablet,
employed to press my heart back into
vacated cavity
simpatico,
who could have said it better,
than thou,
dearest Emily