DIANA WAGNER Creel Limit From Northeast Corridor 1999, Issue 6: “What Remains”: 243-49. PRINT COPY

The blue heron lighted silently on the shallows of the creek bed and regarded me dubiously as we each proceeded with our Sunday morning fishing rituals. Her head about as high as my ribs, she effortlessly plucked a rainbow trout from the stream, dispensing at once with her uncertainty and regarding my fly-line with a kind of pity. It was early; still, my creel remained empty. The kingfisher, perching himself on the dam, seemed likewise to be giving me a lesson in just who does — and doesn't —have a place on the creek in the early morning. But on this Sunday morning, my place is on this creek, where I have learned to be an honest teacher and scholar, where my study of literature has come into vital practice, where I have learned to understand Emily Dickinson.

Standing in thigh-deep water, respectfully stepping out of the path of water snakes and the occasional eel, my thoughts turn from rainbow trout to Dickinson. Emily Dickinson taught me to believe in such a thing as heaven, to disbelieve that man-made conventions will get me there, to value emotion and intimacy, and to understand that irreverence and faith are often the same thing —or at least necessary conditions of the other:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —

I keep it, staying at Home —

With a Bobolink for a Chorister —

And an Orchard, for a Dome— (P 324)^l

And so my Sunday morning matins are often sung to the tempo of the near-silent whish of a fly-line on the creek or on a (rail or on my balcony beneath the arms of the willow tree. (But not always: On some Sundays, my irreverence outweighs my faith, and I ignore the morning and considerations of heaven entirely, deciding that irreverence is the most reverent —and honest—option.)

My belief in heaven was, until my "life closed" (P1732) the first of two times, necessary because hell needed an antithesis. My early catechism had convinced me that original sin was quite real: that I had been born with a seed of badness and, if I were a good Catholic, the best I could hope for was to die being a little less bad than when I started. Sitting in our tiny desks at the Catholic school, we learned quickly that Hell was the vacuum that would suck our morality and our entire seven-year-old selves into an eternity of penance if we weren't careful. The notion that Heaven could exist —or be believed — in the absence of the ubiquitous Anti-Christ was completely foreign to me.

Twenty years later, on my twenty-fourth birthday, my belief in the evil antithesis crumbled as I held my mother's hand as she died and, at the same instant, suddenly I understood Dickinson on a level I had never known before:

I've seen a Dying Eye

Run round and round a Room —

In search of Something — as it seemed —

Then Cloudier become —

And then—obscure with Fog—

And then—be soldered down

Without disclosing what it be

"Twere blessed to have seen— (P 547)

Since that night, when people ask me why I "like" Dickinson, I say, "She feels and experiences what I have been feeling and experiencing all along. But she has the language to say it." The language of this poem articulated what my mother's eyes, what Dickinson's and her mother's eyes before her, saw at that final (or is it inaugural!) moment. I believe they saw heaven, saw the faces of those they had ached to hold, saw an eternity in the form they had wished for but which their catechism had never permitted them to embrace.

My new belief in this Heaven would be tested again under the gaze of the dying eye of my father as he looked around the room, but this time any question of Hell was moot, aside from the hell he endured. And it was then, when my life closed the second time, that I discovered the suspended nature of my nature, that I learned that we live some of our moments sustained by the pure inertia created by panic:

The difference between Despair And Fear—is like the One Between the instant of a Wreck— And when the Wreck has been—

The Mind is smooth—no Motion— Contented as the Eye Upon the Forehead of a Bust— That knows—it cannot see— (P 305)

In that moment between the instant of my father's death and when his death had been, I understood Dickinson's distinction between despair and fear. I knew that this place of suspended animation was not an "in-between" place, but a place distinct and powerful in itself. I understood then, as I took my father's cold face in my trembling hands, that I was living within Dickinson's inertia for that moment. I also knew that the inertia would end. And then I would know Dickinson's fear. Since then, I have looked to Dickinson with the question of how we can grieve the loss of those we love and grieve the loss of a part of our selves without burying either too deeply.

Here, we must understand something vital about Dickinson: She is not a "death poet." Her poetry on dying is, fundamentally, about living (in one realm or another), about continuity, about the nourishment that dying gives to the living. In what is perhaps her most anthologized poem, Dickinson notices during her carriage ride with Death that they

.. . passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun - (P 712)

In Eastern Catholicism, wheat is a central component and symbol of death rituals. Wheat, either baked or boiled and often decorated, is eaten by the mourners at funerals and annual memorial services. The rich symbolism serves to remind us that the wheat must die before it can be separated from the chaff and be of any use in nourishing the living.

Dickinson's death poems resemble this symbolic wheat. They remind us that, after all, living does go on—sometimes against our grief-laden wishes —and that it is only in the simplicity of our daily, domestic lives that the enormity of loss c4n be measured. Such has been the case for me and for Dickinson when faced with the household chores necessary after the dying eyes of our beloved ones have closed:

The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth—

The Sweeping up the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity. (P 1078)

Indeed, we shall not want to use that swept-up love on anyone else. And it seems to me that we don't. I certainly don't. The expression of love for the dead is fundamentally an expression of life; it is an act of life which no formalized funeral ritual or "expected" grieving behavior can supercede. This is why we leave living flowers on the graves of and in the hands of the dead. This is why we plant trees in memorial. This is why we are careful to step around the unplanted mud at the cemetery and stay on the living, growing, green paths. This is why I put flowers below my father's granite name. This is why I place daisies at Dickinson's headstone. And this —this understanding that the dead remain part of our lives — is why, ultimately, any of us bother to read poetry.

"Poetry," said Pablo Neruda, "is an act of peace." I think Dickinson would agree; she would say, too, that poetry is what allows us to touch the peace implicit in the moments we enjoy between despair and fear. The peace of death is vocalized in the last gasp. The peace of the sky is asserted in the crack of thunder. The peace of night is asserted in the shade of a midday cloud passing across the sun. And Dickinson's peace, this peace that gives us the strength to sweep up our hearts, is what allows any of us to feel true intimacy.

Intimacy at death relies entirely on the intimacy that permeates our routine day-to-day existence. Dickinson's day-to-day existence was enveloped in intimacy, in intensity, in a shawl of yearning and passion. But this intensity and intimacy does not come without struggle. Dickinson spent much of her writing life struggling with the problem of how a writer can contain these boundless subjects within language without misrepresenting those subjects. Words, if approached as only inanimate symbols of our perceptions, as linguistic metaphor, both understate and exaggerate what they are meant to represent. By the time a poet commits words to a page or to her lips, they are several times removed from their subjects. The poet's goal, as she fashions language, is to convey her experience of the world as truthfully as possible. Yet, the poet's ultimate nearness to any kind of truth is dependent both on the language she uses to express it and on the constraints inherent (or presumed to be inherent) in that language.

Dickinson found her truth through feelings and, not surprisingly, as she matured as a poet she wrote less and less. While there are many plausible reasons for Dickinson's decreased productivity after the early 1860s, I believe that Dickinson wrote less because she had learned that not everything which is divine and sublime and awesome requires words to complete it.

Dickinson comes to believe that language is sometimes a mediator between Truth and her passion. Rarely, the distance across that bridge can be so slight that words and their corresponding Truths are indistinguishable. And as we see often in her passionate epistles to her sister-in-law, Sue, she claims that language does not need to be spoken or written—made flesh— to complete the mediation. The consistent premise on which Dickinson based all of these conclusions is simply this: Language has power. But passion is more powerful, still.

Several years ago as I stood in Dickinson's bedroom, looking down onto Amherst's Main Street, I began to wonder what she had seen there. I wondered how she insulated her spirit from the threats walking by her window—the threat personified in conventional church ladies with orderly prayer books and self-gratifying stewardship to the church. Then I started to write*:

There's still a face at the window over Amherst's Main Street Surveying beneath our asphalt forgotten furrows worn by church ladies all pies and pantaloons and preaching

Not her own

steepled belled divinity

laid by masons and men

styled by fire

rung by deacons

across the Sunday morning

veil of reverence

This Divinity can't scratch the shawl

around heaven's shoulders

but would tear the woven

Word away if it could grasp

a loose string from the T

of Truth

This face at the window needle in hand mends her white hem her thread of Truth knotted extra tight to keep deacons from ripping the seam.

Her own.

Poetry—Dickinson's poetry—for me, is a reminder that I control the strength of my own seams, my own passions, my own devotions. She reminds me that the doctrines I follow and the faiths I profess don't have to be bound in a church book or delivered from a pulpit or attested to by an upstanding leader. Dickinson teaches me with each reading that it takes a lot of faith and reverence to be irreverent. Irreverence to conventions (social, political, theological, economic), irreverence to those things that are expected of me, irreverence to the standard rules —all of these things require a strong faith. This faith professes a belief that risk, when undertaken in the pursuit of honesty and good conscience, is always worth it. This faith emphasizes that honest living will help us maintain our balance and our sense of direction in the abyss between despair and fear.

There is no abyss as I stand in the trout stream. I am in a place that, it seems to me, Dickinson and I co-created. I found the trout pools and she brought the poems. The heron and kingfisher bring their own punctuation to the matins. My fly-line sets the tempo. The water serpents remind us that archetypes of evil are always unsurprising and seldom evil. And so I stand, thigh-deep in poetry. And if I catch nothing on this day it is because my creel is already full.

* I often think that it is both humbling and fool-hardy to try to write poetry about Dickinson. Such an undertaking often strikes me as the equivalent of singing a corn-shucking song for Pavarotti while he sits in my living room. But at the very least, I think Dickinson would be amused by my efforts. And she just might remind me that a full heart does not require the confines of language.