A Window in Time

A Slash of Blue -  

A Sweep of Gray -

Some scarlet patches – on the way –

Compose an Evening Sky –

Emily Dickinson

Clearly Emily Dickinson knew how to look through a window. She knew how to move close to the wavy glass that was prevalent in the nineteenth century. She knew how to touch the surface and understand the world presented to her through the rectangle. Her home was full of windows and so she could peer out day and night, organize thoughts and landscape, often using a minimalist palette to present her images. She is said to have spent most of her life in hiding, but I don’t believe that.

The images she created are ones that have never slipped into oblivion, as the poet's life seemed to try so hard to do:

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Obviously, a person who resides in the realm of the possible has limitless options. Is this the sane as hiding from life? I think not. Anything can happen within the world of possibility, and often does. Emily knew this, her poems prove it. She was very much out and about, but it was just her way, not one others could see.

We therefore might do well to rethink the idea of a recluse dressed in white, a woman with no life outside her white dress and her interiors. Possibility's address is a home of openings onto the world - whether the openings be in the form of windows or of doors. Did the writer really need to venture out to prove to the world who she was or did the numerous rectangles in her Amherst home bring the world to her, well-formed, happily-imagined, thoughtfully pressed into shape? Why force the world with all its rudeness and noise on a person who needs neither?

I am not certain these feelings, my defense of the poet, are what I should be writing about, but I still can’t help thinking she has been misjudged, made over into something she was not. They did something similar to her contemporary, the Galician writer Rosalía de Castro, although the myths were different. They still obscured the woman who wrote.

We rarely consider the canvas - which is also frequently the shape of a window - with its paint or ink to be limiting, a second-rate view of reality. A painting fits the measurements of the surface where it sits, just as Emily could measure and issue statements on the weight of what she saw from within. Within: a term to be reckoned with. Within her, and within her house. Two interiors, one inside the other, doubly deep. Not doubly hidden, not dull. In fact, all her poems burst open, some more subtly than others, but burst they do. Ask the hyphens, which are part of the over 1700 works of art Emily produced.

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These were my thoughts as I was trying to write an essay for my course on nineteenth-century literature. I had chosen Emily Dickinson because I always had the feeling she was terribly misunderstood. However, my attempt to write something profound enough to get a good grade didn't seem to get at the heart of the matter. I felt like I was still on the other side of the window, staring in at Emily, feeling guilty about it. Feeling too emotional to write clearly.

"There must be a better way to go about this," I told myself, and then it occurred to me:

"I'll sit by my own window in the middle of the night and look out." I was beginning to feel like that might actually work. It had to, because I was running out of time as well as ideas. The paper was due the day after tomorrow.

I planned the sitting by the window session - if that's what you want to call it - carefully and well. First of all, I chose an herbal tea of some kind - lavender and thyme, perhaps - and then I put on a pair of white pajamas. Since I don't own any nightgowns, the pajamas would have to do. I was surprised to discover the pajamas in a closet, because I didn’t recall buying any that color, but was so pleased to have found them.

Next, I made sure my cell phone was off - not that anybody would be calling in the middle of the night, but just in case. Even the vibration when notifying the arrival of an email could be distracting. It also seemed it might be disrespectful if one were trying to channel a nineteenth-century writer.

Then I looked around and chose a comfortable chair, which I managed to slide closer to the window. It could be returned to its place after the session beside the window had been completed.

The final step in the preparation for looking and feeling like Emily looking out a window was to select how to do the writing that was the goal of the session. I like to write directly on my laptop, but somehow that felt out of step with nineteenth-century literary work, and after all the goal was to put myself in the place of Emily the window-writer. 

It was clear I would need to use the proper paper and an appropriate writing instrument. A fountain pen would give my project just the right touch, and I wasn’t able to force myself to work with a quill pen that makes a writer stop and start and is so annoying when inspiration comes, and I also chose an unusual olive-colored ink, hoping that would increase my chances for inspiration. Green ink, like the dark foliage in the middle of the night.

I smiled at the thought.

Aware that Emily was prone to snatching colors and forms from her viewing spot, I resolved to try to do the same thing - to take slices or strips of color in movement, add hyphens to help everything dart across the line like hurried birds, capture fragments of sight. Eager for success, I nevertheless sat still and waited. It seemed like the way to start was to let the world come to me.

Outside something did indeed flash by. It had the appearance of a bat, so I wrote down the word: BAT. In big green letters. Maybe I should have chosen a different color. Maybe I was going about this in the wrong way.

My three-letter word sat there on the paper, possessing no flash at all. Disillusioned, I thought of its color: dark brown. Its sound: a slender squeak, then silence. At that point I realized the bat had become a thread, a flap, a tiny hinge in the dark, a door to the house of evening air. It had come into my room, inside, through the window. The window whose pane was an opening, not a barrier.

Next there came across the opening of the window a cold dot of illumination, a nocturnal sun, necessarily miniature, like a tiny button trying to be yellow and dropping its color before it could achieve a true golden glow. 

There is only one insect I know that can shine like that, but I couldn't make it out, couldn't be sure if it was the firefly or lightning bug, wondering which name was the correct one for Emily. Then I realized Emily wouldn't have called it either, wouldn't have used its name. She might have likened it to Morse code, night writing, aureous scribbling among the shadows. She had so many options, looking out her windows.

I was never going to be able to capture that, to connect syllables with their things but not always in the language of every day. To hone words to sharp focusing tools, to a sculpting medium. That was what my poet did, slashing away all the excess reality and framing her portraits of them with white, the white page her white dress.

After a few more minutes, a black and green wind rose up and cantered, or galloped by my quiet rectangle. It startled the leaves of the more distant oaks off to the left and outside my range of view. It was shredded by the pine needles as they told it to slow down and breathe. Arumes dos pinos, I thought, recalling the title of a book in Galician poet published in 1886. Wait, no, it’s Queixumes, not Arumes. Certainly the author, Pondal, would feel insulted by my error. 

Maybe poetry is just not my thing.

Maybe I’ll give poetry one last try. Maybe it’s the essay I need to forget.

A gash in the wall

A slice between

A sitting without saying and body unfolded

Stiff and open-eyed, I stared toward the wound in the wall

I wondered if it felt pain or needed remembering, for which

I offered the things that I had

brought with me to this place where I

never intended to stay this long

because we were not supposed to be here alone

neither the window nor I the/its watcher

Evening is seeping through the tissue and falling all over the bed where

other things are:

a sheet 

a blanket

the memories of

not planning to be alone here

not needing to turn away from the cliff in the back that

wants to know where we are, the plans we still might have and

the roaring silence of crickets

The fox must be out by now, but says nothing while my

other window is for the raccoons who only want food, no tough

A light gray hinge is creaking the dull sky toward the grass

Breathing ceases until we remember our lungs

A bat trio swivels and dives, devouring what is in the way

There is probably a way to make what is outside this

window bigger, but I don’t know what

it is, and

anyway,

there’s already enough to

share 

There’s always that