How People Live

All — is the price of All —
Emily Dickinson
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(for Reed and Richard)

Emily Dickinson split the atom.
I scratch my behind.
But sometimes when I stretch
my spine and send cascades
of neurons flinging, tingling off
and in and out – well, I begin
to think I’m on the brink

of Emily’s embrace of doubt.
Fortunately, I (inertia
on my side) decide to slide –
and coast into a kind of ride
for which there aren’t any rules
that I’ve supplied. Today I walked into
a friend’s apartment – just imagine:

he is half the globe away
in Sydney! – I'd retrieved his
mail to lay it on his black settee –
then filled a kitchen glass with water
which I poured into a tiny
ivy plant: complete – inured
to its environment of silence –

undergoing permutations
of a secret evolution I will never know.
A bit like the infernal glow
of Mistress Dickinson.
I helped another friend dismantle –
then to move – a table in his dining room –
holes and hooks and dowels

had to be undone and put
together with a fair amount of care:
agility – fragility. I wonder
that we carry on. I wonder that we dare.
I then walked through the nineteenth
century magnificently
groaning board of lower Broadway –

to a supermarket where I bought three
kinds of frozen vegetables
and liquid hand-soap with a spout.
(Emily’s embrace of doubt.)
If there’s a purpose,
I am absolutely sure it’s blinking at us,
right here on the surface.


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