Emily Above The Sea

In the sequence of sensations that pass through her sleeping mind every night, Emily Dickinson is standing on a wide cliff above a furious ocean. Angry waves crash upon the rocks at the base of the cliff and send fists of foamy gray water into the sky. Every so often a menacing rogue wave threatens to reach up and pull her into the sea.

The bitter cold is gnawing into her bones, biting and crunching, because she is completely nude, shorn of her customary white dress. She is small, like a wren, and her hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and her eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.

Emily looks hard into the watery abyss below and asks, “Is my verse … alive?”