Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

THREE EMILY POEMS

THREE EMILY POEMS

EMILY (BUTCHER)

those serial killer eyes
that butcher’s smock

dead give aways
told you are a poet
I would have put
good money on
you writing
   thus exactly

your writing desk an
abbatoir
     where you carve and cure
your fillet steak
cut thick or
thin, made
to exact measure

horrible and gorgeous
how when I read
a line
I can taste
the blood

    would you like your
poetry rare, Sir, or au
              tartare

the potatoes, greens,
well these we can give you
done well done
       all the way from
crunchy crisp
to
   rock hard

sweeter than sweet when
you sing
the soul’s dark song though

solitary in the darkness, none
so intrepid as
      to join, let
         alone sing along

     ****
EMILY (SAVAGE)

Oh, my
quiet savage

everything about
you so starched white

yet underneath
along the underbelly
seething
     simmering

and me
ready to come to the party

having drunk
a gallon of French symbolism
bordeaux sweet but also
Paris Richelieu
every syllable so smooth
every progression
as seductive
as it might
possibly be

together
let us then
aim for a masterpiece

chuck in a bucket
all that forever contradicting
itself Whitman democracy

sail
  down the Seine
go full
      Rimbaud
           Mallarmé

total
raging Baudelaire.

****
EMILY MASHUP
(a Dickinson/Leone mashup)

she good

she bad

and she
way beyond Tuco Ramirez ugly
(very
      definition of Nietzsche’s
           sense of beyond)

she the three –
way duel, three
pistoleros, shadows
one
       self

the civil war graveyard
extreme longshot
close up
             zoom

Mexican
stand-off of all time

EMILY

EMILY
(a Dickinson/Leone mashup)

she good

she bad

and she
way beyond Tuco Ramirez ugly
(very
      definition of Nietzsche’s
           sense of beyond)

she the three –
way duel, three
pistoleros, shadows
one
       self

the civil war graveyard
extreme longshot
close up
             zoom

Mexican
stand-off of all time

BONE CHINA

BONE CHINA

was at sister Emily’s house
drinking chamomile tea
from fine bone China

the day felt paradisal
but in the air
talk of civil war

so she and I chatted about
brutality, death and slavery

saw this escaped prisoner
making his divine way
to her front door
across her garden pathway

much we hoped he had
in store for us, was
bleeding
     to tell us

leave us feeling in
the eternally ambiguous state
of hopeful, quietly
terrified,
     secret acolyte

EMILY

EMILY

I remember the day
dearly recall

stumbling upon your house
tumbling through your door
crashing
on your floor

lucky the sheaves and sheaves
scattered their to
break my fall
keep me warm
as I did sleep

and sleep I did
for a very lomg time
but time
   is, they say, relative
and what
might have seemed eons
could just
have been
a year

cocooned in that great nest
of all your best poems

and me wandering through
them all
      stanza by stanza
whole of that
dreamtime
           opening door
after door
inside room
after room

upstairs
    downstairs

curved spiral
and spine

somewhere up there
a down there
the box of legend full
of
   smell of death carriage,
bone,  zero
snake
        and sharpest of splinter
of shard
that the eye
might penetrate

this night nurse of a woman
you have smocked and
thereby
          contained

look again!
look again!

     the horror is so thick
it does not need to seep

the whole
of your continent in
usual sweet quandry, yet
one more dead mistake

EMILY

EMILY

those serial killer eyes
that butcher’s smock

dead give aways
told you are a poet
I would have put
good money on
you writing
thus exactly

your writing desk an
abbatoir
where you carve and cure
your fillet steak
cut thick or
thin, made
to exact measure

horrible and gorgeous
how when I read
a line
I can taste
the bloodwould you like your

poetry rare, Sir, or au
tartare

the potatoes, greens,
well these we can give you
done well done
all the way from
crunchy crisp
to
rock hard

sweeter than sweet when
you sing
the soul’s dark song though

solitary in the darkness, none
so intrepid as
to join, let
alone sing along

EMILY

EMILY

Oh, my
quiet savage

everything about
you so starched white

yet underneath
along the underbelly
seething
simmering

and me
ready to come to the party

having drunk
a gallon of French symbolism
bordeaux sweet but also
Paris Richelieu
every syllable so smooth
every progression
as seductive
as it might
possibly be

together
let us then
aim for a masterpiece

chuck in a bucket
all that forever contradicting
itself Whitman democracy

sail
down the Seine
go full
Rimbaud
Mallarmé

total
raging Baudelaire.