I like your hair. After you died, your sister Vinnie argued and cried about it, it was too tight, too thin, too closely pinned to your head like your mouth through it's life. You are, Emily, the only nova you never knew. You blew a century aside with dried up ink, you first, fast mistress of mistrusted meter, postmodern cadence and beats measured out like any other recipe, ever. I hold you very carefully in my heart where you're alive and well and in the prettiest state--the finally knowing where all poems start. For 100 years and counting, we've been tapping on your grave. Men live in Amherst just because you died there and there are 66-year old women named Emily after you. Libraries hold you high in the air, schools dissect you, philosophers digest and reassemble thoughts you thought long since left behind. You teach me words like daguerreotype, tippet and tulle. I dreamt you swept through my life on a Saturday night, laughed and then said, "Lisa, you party like multiple tables of men!" I have both footnoted and noted you loudly instead. I carry your words around and around in things called buses that lap modern miles. Your most famous poem became "Because I could not stop for death" and did you really never? You laid a town down when you entered the ground in a white, flannel shroud. You constantly show me the strength of a pause. So, if I worship in orchards and count the bees in the field and save wild nights, wild nights for mooring in thee will I someday make my glorious way to women like you and Anne and Sylvia? Have you chatted with Plath? Do you talk incessantly now in death to work out shy anemone pains of your past? I know you're safe and warm in your solitary cell. Sleep well, Emily. I'll continually croon for you, my epiphany, my poltergeist poet, my fuselage muse.
Lisa Hemminger, Colossus Taught Us (Once), copyright 2000, Water of Life Press. Used with permission.
