Gary LeBel
Emily at the Window
“I am small, like the wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur,
and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.”
The house is quiet. You rise and go to the window. You open it; it sticks a little. The night is dressed in a veil of crickets. The air rushes in, cool and damp on your forehead, blowing a few strands of hair across your cheeks, hair unbound for sleeping, split like the wake of a boat by the keel of your fineboned shoulders.
You are fifty-five, fifty-five! How is it possible? You feel an old hunger rise up from your belly, and when it reaches your eyes you close them and bite your lip: an ageless thing, it chills you bittersweetly to the bone as it did when you were twenty, you shiver. It knows that you have embraced your life, and that it has loved you as ardently as you gave. Your bedclothes flutter lightly as the breeze seeks and finds its way in past your modesty through the neckline of your nightdress . . .
and in the depths of the quiet night you hear them as they march in step, the lines you wrote that morning, and the newer paths they cut at dusk as you tap their rhythms out with a slippered foot.
You open your eyes. A lantern shines brightly in your desk drawer but you don’t see it, for you have no idea of the wick you’ve lit, no idea of the dazzling light that will surround your voice and name for all of time like an Egyptian queen’s cartouche . . .
instead, you hear only the muffled, familiar creaks of the old house where you were born and have lived most all of your life of quiet days and nights, as much alone tonight as the red fox that pads through clearings beyond the reach of Amherst’s flickering gaslights,
touched by distant fields whose fragrance the night wind bears like an offering: you inhale it deeply, and with the swoon of a lover you close your eyes once more, your lips breaking into a smile that only the window sees
and when you open them, flushed as if the whole world were suddenly coursing
through the chambers of your heart at once, with everything strangely in place,
covered in gooseflesh, you close the window . . . and when you do
you catch your image
in the blackness of the glass,
and between your being and its reflection
how much closer they seem tonight,
the huddling stars of Orion . . .
Remembering Emily Dickinson (1830-86)
The introductory quote was taken from her correspondence.
This image was inspired by composer John Adams’s brilliant work for orchestra and mixed chorus, “Harmonium,” featuring two poems by Emily Dickinson and one by John Donne.
About the Author:
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.