days

A shady friend — for Torrid days —
Is easier to find —
Than one of higher temperature
For Frigid — hour of Mind —

The Vane a little to the East —
Scares Muslin souls — away —
If Broadcloth Hearts are firmer —
Than those of Organdy —

Who is to blame? The Weaver?
Ah, the bewildering thread!
The Tapestries of Paradise
So notelessly — are made!

These are the days when Birds come back –
A very few — a Bird or two –
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old — old sophistries of June –
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee –
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear –
And softly thro’ the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze –
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake –
They consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

Daily Routines offers a look into the (often compulsive) schedules of “writers, artists, and other interesting people.” Subjects include Franz Kafka, Corbusier, Jasper Johns, and Karl Marx.

Emily Dickinson is represented with a schedule of her days at Mount Holyoke seminary. It’s a strict routine of studies, lectures, music practice, and meals.

It’s worth noting that during her time at Holyoke, Dickinson said of herself that “I am one of the lingering bad ones, and so do I slink away, and pause, and ponder, and ponder, and pause.” Perhaps that’s why she wrote of absence and tardiness and “ten thousand other things, which I will not take time or place to mention . . .”: to mention them in great detail would no doubt expose much of her inner life.

Summer for thee grant I may be
When summer days are flown!
Thy music still when whippoorwill
And oriole are done!

For thee to bloom, I’ll skip the tomb
And sow my blossoms o’er!
Pray gather me, Anemone,
Thy flower forevermore!

The farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake, –
A crash without a sound;
How life’s reverberation
Its explanation found!

To venerate the simple days
Which lead the seasons by,
Needs but to remember
That from you or me
They may take the trifle
Termed mortality!

To invest existence with a stately air,
Needs but to remember
That the acorn there
Is the egg of forests
For the upper air!

Podcast music by Antonio Meneses

By the end of the week Emily began to be sighted outside her room, a mysterious and elusive figure fleeting as a woodland creature no sooner glimpsed than it has vanished.

“EDickionson RepliLuxe” by Joyce Carol Oates, from Wild Nights!

In “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”, Joyce Carol Oates offers a science fiction fable about Emily Dickinson–or, rather, a stunted facsimile of the Belle of Amherst–come to live with a modern suburban couple. Sold by RepliLuxe, Inc., the “child-sized Emily . . . wearing tiny buckled shoes” was supposed to “enrich, enhance, ‘double in value’ one’s life,” but instead becomes a disturbing and disruptive presence in their house. Both husband and wife seek to “own” Dickinson–the wife through an appeal to sisterly and poetic urges, the husband through brute force–but in the end, it is the Dickinson automaton who possesses herself.

I’ll admit that I’m not always an Oates fan; while I recognize that she has made an interesting marriage of realism and the Gothic, I find that her stories are often overwrought and predictable. But this story, though not terribly surprising in plot, is more subdued than I had expected; perhaps the gnomic Dickinson has a calming effect. The story is told in the broad strokes of a fairy tale, with the Dickinson mannequin a more deeply realized character than the husband and wife, but the sketchiness works where a more detailed treatment would not, hinting and suggesting with an economy of language much like Dickinson’s poems.

“EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is on of five stories in Oates’ new collection, Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The subtitle is a bit misleading: the Dickinson story takes place more than a century after her “last days,” and the Poe story is a Gothic fantasia on Poe’s life-after-death, or perhaps an alternate history in which he lives on; though the other stories do imagine their subjects’ last hours in intriguing ways. This is certainly a collection that will appeal to the English (or American Studies) major, full of allusion and pastiche. Indeed, it may be a bit much of that, a little too flattering to the students who paid attention in that survey of American literature class. But sometimes it’s nice to be flattered for knowing about Poe, Dickinson, et al, when one is out of touch with “Survivor” and “American Idol.”

On such a night, or such a night,
Would anybody care
If such a little figure
Slipped quiet from its chair,

So quiet, oh, how quiet!
That nobody might know
But that the little figure
Rocked softer, to and fro?

On such a dawn, or such a dawn,
Would anybody sigh
That such a little figure
Too sound asleep did lie

For chanticleer to wake it, –
Or stirring house below,
Or giddy bird in orchard,
Or early task to do?

There was a little figure plump
For every little knoll,
Busy needles, and spools of thread,
And trudging feet from school.

Playmates, and holidays, and nuts,
And visions vast and small.
Strange that the feet so precious charged
Should reach so small a goal!