I may have to undertake the task of reading all of Emily Dickinson's poetry. I am constantly amazed at coming across another new to me ED poem. Here is the one I stumbled upon today.

I've known a Heaven like a tent
To wrap its shining yards,
Pluck up its stakes and disappear
Without the sound of boards
Or rip of nail, or carpenter,
But just the miles of stare
That signalize a show's retreat
In North America.
No trace, no figment of the thing
That dazzled yesterday,
No ring, no marvel;
Men and feats
Dissolved as utterly
As birds' far navigation
Discloses just a hue;
A plash of oars -a gaiety,
Then swallowed up to view.

Well, she could make a good poem from just about anything, even the sight of a revivalist meeting pulling up stakes.

Gee, I was thinking circus, but I'll bet you are right.

I've been listening to Shakespeare sonnets read by a wide variety of people on Prairie Home Companion as I've been in my garden. Nice day, huh?

SONNET 43
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

No.,looking again. I think you had it right.

I mentioned I was going through Shakespeare's sonnets again. I never realized that No. 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," was written to a man, as a good many of the sonnets are. I had assumed this one was about a woman. The only clue to the gender, though, is the context of the poem. The poem occurs in a section of the sequence in which there is no doubt that the poet is addressing a man.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I've been meaning to come back to this post since I first read it a few weeks ago. I am so curious about what lead you to believe it was written for a man? What evidence is there in the other poems in the sequence?

Now, here is the poem that has been on my mind.

The Book of the Dead Man (Food)
by Marvin Bell

Live as if you were already dead.
Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and Food

The dead man likes chocolate, dark chocolate.
The dead man remembers custard as it was, spumoni as it was, shave
ice as it was.
The dead man talks food with an active tongue, licks his fingers, takes
seconds, but has moved on to salads.
It's the cheese, it's the crunch of the crunchy, it's the vinegar in the oil
that makes a salad more than grass.
The dead man has a grassy disposition but no cow stomach for flappy
leaves and diced croutons.
The dead man remembers oysterettes as they were.
He recalls good water and metal-free fish.
Headlights from the dock drew in blue claw crabs by the bucketful.
A flashlight showed them where the net lay.
If they looked bigger in the water than in the pail, they grew back on the
stove.
It was like that, before salads.
The dead man, at the age he is, has redefined mealtime.
It being the quantum fact that the dead man does not believe in time, but
in mealtime.

2. More About the Dead Man and Food

The dead man's happiness may seem unseemly.
By land or by sea, aloft or alit, happiness befalls us.
Were mankind less transfixed by its own importance, it would be harder
to be happy.
Were the poets less obsessed with the illusion of the self, it would be
more difficult to sing.
It would be crisscross, it would be askew, it would be zigzag, it would be
awry, it would be cockeyed in any context of thought.
The dead man has felt the sensation of living.
He has felt the orgasmic, the restful, the ambiguous, the nearly-falling-over,
the equilibrium, the lightning-in-the-bottle and the bottle in shards.
You cannot make the dead man write what you want.
The dead man offers quick approval but seeks none in return.
Chocolate is the more existential, it has the requisite absurdity, it loosens
the gland.
The dead man must choose what he ingests, it cannot be anything goes
in the world the world made.
So we come back to chocolate, which frees the dead man's tongue.
The dead man is every emotion at once, every heartbreak, every falling-
down laugh riot, every fishhook that caught a finger.

Troublesome and intriguing. But Bell rather sums up the essence, doesn't he? Death or life. Interesting take on death, being that once you are dead, you don't change. Change was and is for the living. The dead man makes no more mistakes; there is observation, rumination, every "emotion at once". He seems to be taking , as one would logically think, a passive, uh, well, stance. But here he is "choosing". He MUST choose. This is what intrigues me most about Bell's hero here (other than the fact we are talking about a dead man). Why must he choose?
Darn. This is going to be one to chew on for quite a while.

It's the context of the sonnet within the group of sonnets where the poet is clearly talking about a man. The book begins with the poet sayijng many times, "Get you some children or you'll leave nothing of yourself behind," and then transitions to more general praise of this man whom the poet admires, and indeed loves. But it does not appear to be homosexual love, rather the love between males that apparently was more acceptable then. Out of context, there is of course no reason not to consider the person addressed as a female.

I have a poem on my mind, too. I was looking up this morning at some swifts (well, okay, they might have been swallows) dipping and turning, and thought of the Robert Graves lyric. It is very Frostian, I think.

Flying Crooked


The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Thanks for this Dwill, great poem.

Very nice.

I recieve a poem a day in my email from Poets.org. Many of them I can't make heads or tails of and just when I think I will discontinue the poems a good one comes along. Here is todays good one -


Man in Stream
by Rosanna Warren

You stand in the brook, mud smearing
your forearms, a bloodied mosquito on your brow,
your yellow T-shirt dampened to your chest
as the current flees between your legs,
amber, verdigris, unraveling
today's story, last night's travail . . .

You stare at the father beaver, eye to eye,
but he outstares you—you who trespass in his world,
who have, however unwilling, yanked out his fort,
stick by tooth-gnarled, mud-clabbered stick,
though you whistle vespers to the wood thrush
and trace flame-flicker in the grain of yellow birch.

Death outpaces us. Upended roots
of fallen trees still cling to moss-furred granite.
Lichen smolders on wood-rot, fungus trails in wisps.
I wanted a day with cracks, to let the godlight in.
The forest is always a nocturne, but it gleams,
the birch tree tosses its change from palm to palm,

and we who unmake are ourselves unmade
if we know, if only we know
how to give ourselves in this untendered light.

This is really good. One you want to read over and over again.

I've had a poem stuck in my head for the last 2 weeks, a friend sent to to me on an email and every time I get a quiet moment it pops back into my head.

The Alter
by Charles Simic

The plastic statue of the Virgin
On top of a bedroom dresser
With a blackened mirror
From a bad-dream grooming salon.
Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,
A small, grinning windup monkey,
A bronze Egyptian coin
And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed
Communion photograph of a boy
With the eyes of someone
Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.
What is beautiful, it cautions,
Is found accidentally and not sought after.
What is beautiful is easily lost.

Thanks for posting.