High Walk Out of Town and Emily DickInson

A single mossy tree...

The paved road up into the eastern hills in Cloverdale's little "wilderness" parallels Porterfield Creek as you climb to the town's water towers. The road has no downhill dips. It's an uphill climb all the way, through meadows, then scrub and manzanita, then madrone, tall pines, and the great live oaks  hovering over their shadows.  The first  big mossy tree flings its arms in every direction, like a gate guardian to the wooded section of the trail high above the creek. If the hiker doesn't recoil, its limbs seem to wave in welcome.

Barrier branches...

Winter-brittle branches not yet greened by spring reach out on the horizontal.  Everywhere, the green is rising.  Even high above the stream, running full after spring rains, the roar of water at full fall, too, is rising. Little falls erupt from  the grasses on the hillside. Any trace that has ever been a water run is full now, following the hill down to join the main  stream.

Fallen elder, returning...

All along the path, fresh leaflets emerge from the base of  winter-dry stalks of anise, spring defying the gray-dead  stands of last year. Then, against a hill, I come upon the outline of a fallen tree in decay, this  cycle of Nature a transformation with no promise of revival, survival in the old form. Trunk, limbs, have begun the slow process of returning to soil. 

Billy Collins, reading and discussing Emily Dickinson's work on NPR, tells his students, "If you're majoring in English, you're majoring in death. That's what you're getting for your tuition." Death is surely Emily's major subject. (In my copy of her complete poems, "Death" is indeed the longest list in the subject index, with a final note, "See also Immortality and Resurrection," and preceded by a longish entry for "Dead.")

When I first visited Emily's Amherst home, I met a college dean who had played the Julie Harris role in The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman play in which only Emily is portrayed. I'd seen Harris's performance both on the stage and  on television, so I knew the way in which the drama brought all the major figures in Emily's world to life through her dramatic gestures toward them. Quite by accident, I met the dean again the next morning at Emily's grave. For nearly an hour, she pointed out the places Emily had written about and recited the poems she had written, as though Emily had leaped up from the fenced off family plot to say them one more time.

After the tour, I'd walked to the church Emily's father had helped to build. She'd gone down the street with him one moonlit night to see the structure, though  she had never gone inside. Inside, I met a minister who'd shared with me the moment in the cupola outside Emily's upstairs room--her vantage point to look over the town--the sound of one fly buzzing to its autumn death. At the church, he was very nearly in tears, with the spectrum of stained glass dappling his shoulders. "My wife died this past year," he said. "Only two things could comfort me: the bible, and the poems of Emily Dickinson."

Billy Collins said, "I like the little poems. The poet, after  all, is an apparitional figure--opening the door, saying something, and closing it again." 

When Terry Gross  asked Collins to comment on Emily's biography and its effect on her work, Collins  said, "I prefer the poem to the life." Then he confessed he had written a poem, "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," in response to the mysteries of  her sexuality. The poet chooses to disrobe Emily from  the clothes she wore in her poem "Because I would not stop for Death," where Death takes her in her carriage. First he removes her tippet of tulle, then her bonnet, the white dress. At last, he frees her of her corset. In one line, he describes "...the sudden dashes when we spoke." His poem,  he suggested slyly, should resolve the issue of whether Emily had ever made love.

High country...

Death walks  along the trail with me as I climb out of the valley, in the dry stalks of last year's vegetation, in the fallen tree, in the underbrush where new grass is pushing through.  In the high dry bareness near the water towers,  I remember the desert I love, the spare empty ground of silence, sage after rain, the alkaline fragrance of the soil in the relentless heat of summer, where I could hear the gnat at my ear, the beat of my own heart, the simple sounds of life in the stillness that made room for them.

Cloverdale nestled in the valley...

Down below me, tucked between the hills to east and west, lies  Cloverdale,  the village where I live. The little mountain town nestles in the Alexander Valley, among the prime wineries at the foot of the Mayacamas     mountains to the east, and the eastern hills where I stand. In the far mountains, eighteen steam power plants could light most of the state of California, as they now light the Golden Gate Bridge and much of the northern part of the state. There, the earth's magma is close to the surface (about two miles down). Geysers spring up, and steam. At the plants, the steam turns generators and then is "recycled" back to the earth's heat to rise again as steam. A simplistic explanation for a complicated process. 

The old town slogan, "Where the redwoods meet the vineyards," has changed since Cloverdale was named the (second) "best small town in America" in 2010. Now we are "Genuinely Cloverdale.

Coming down again, past the dry hillside, the fallen tree, the dry stalks of last year's vegetation with green newness pushing through, Emily comes to mind again. Her home, her words, her punctuation without explanation.

Visiting Emily Long After Her Death

            Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.—E. D.

She faces down her father across the living room,

meeting the eyes of his photograph, the familiar one

where he glowers as the photographer aims.

Smile, Mr. Dickinson.

I am smiling, Emily’s father replies,

or so the tour guide says. In her Mt. Holyoke dress

of white eyelet, Emily stifles a grin, if ever she grins.

His grimness is no pose. All that punctuation

up in her room in the drawer, all those poems

not yet shouting out the door, dashed and divided,

broken thoughts, healing. Emily gets her things

for the long saunter in the stormy night

to Death, the cold shoulder of New England snow.

In the tower room, Emily’s perspective on the world,

a slow fly dies, an echo of the buzz in the line of a poem.

The church can be seen, the one her father built.

He takes her out for a walk under the moon that falls

over the quarried stone, the steeple brushing the clouds,

polite windows of gray and black glass, not ostentatious

but rich with parishioner’s funds. Her father’s church.

She struggles with love at a distance: a few parlor calls,

words flung out on their own. Her sister-in-law Sue.

High-coach Austin, buried away from the family plot

in the new cemetery. Her brother. His choice and demand.

In her room hang white curtains, freshly washed,

as though she will draw them aside for a view

of the town, Amherst, the edge of her vision.

Glasses folded on her desk, she sleeps.

Thank you, Emily, for making me want to be a poet. I'm working on it...

Photographs by Luna Zeffer 
Apologies for spacing problems! Couldn't fix! gl