Unspeakable Blossoms

Emily Dickinson
wasn’t fond of cats.
I just learned that
she once drowned

three kittens in a vat
of pickle brine.
Lies strangely
with her line: “Drowning

is not so pitiful
as the attempt to rise.”
Unspeakable blossoms
bloomed in her eyes.

[probably unnecessary apologia: written to someone who thought the poem was about Emily D. being bad, or something:

"I know this is such a charged & unpalatable anecdote about Emily D. -- however I didn't provide it to excoriate her for her sins (however arguably this be one), but rather, perhaps, to suggest that no human being, and surely no great artist, is not capable of understanding & (sometimes even) committing atrocity. And with Emily D., who was and is so often unwarrantedly made the 'safe' pretty poet of 'nature' and ambiguous musings about life & death in hymnal prosody, this seems even more powerfully important a point: Emily Dickinson wrote some frighteningly insightful & eruptively anarchic poems -- she comes as close as anyone I know since Milton (and maybe Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof!) to persuading me she's had more than a few conversations with "God." She ain't no fragile flower. So the poem, if I can be permitted this little exegesis of it (which I cringe at providing), is maybe meant to jolt us out of any complacency we might to bring not only to her, but to the human condition, and its infinite and sometimes appalling variety. Emily shocked, with magnificent skill -- but also, sometimes, like any human being, with abhorrent behavior.

Makes ya kinda sit up & relate, don't it?"}

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