Through Fine Curtains, Looking At Her Coming Up The Walk For The Last Time Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

'safe in their alabaster chambers'
=Emily Dickinson

for Julie Harris in her portrayal of 'The Belle of Amherst'

the sunrise of the half-risen strays
through fitful curtains, choking the days
that lie before-
to summer's brim with
whatever it is-
they will not say to your face,

too croaking to be remembered;
though you've brought flowers,
whole meadows full, and buckets of Grace,
your cherry-sprigged bonnet-
and new mown everything.

there is no birdsong here; no wooded greens.
faint trickling of a dried up stream-
a ransacked drawer of odds and ends;
a picked lock scream as suddenly, stifled:
you rob- just yourselves.

selective invitations on cream paper,
illegible as a dream within a dream or calling cards,
in someone else's gilded handwriting with
swiss-dotted 'i's'.

the tapping of a bold foot on a Sunday floor,
clean-swept- a merry look thwarted.
-it looks like snow, you offer;
they contradict -it's May.
the afternoon ravels on its way.

and if you try to speak in thick blues and greens,
in rivulets of feeling, rose fraught gleams
above the teacup clatter, the bacon and eggs,
the sauce pan chatter-
to sense- bright rivers of words! breaking on the tip of a blackberried sweetness, mid-conversation-

they bolt and leave you speechless:

dispensing-
whatever's left of time, in meager
party prizes, always to someone else;
while looking slantwise at your dress-
their Delft-
(as if you'd stolen it) -

handing you, your galoshes.

oh pour it all down the drain
with your thin lipped receipts for
raspberry vinaigrettes, peerless pimento cheeses
in seven counties (oh, Pleiades...):

your boiling rhubarb, spoilt silk
tea time's tipping over!

I'm like a pearl edged bird, invisible in the blizzard
of your disparaging till I cry in a voice of yellow diamonds oh
why-
why have you quenched the golden

mary angela douglas 9 june 2014

Note on the poem: This is how I imagine Emily Dickinson calling on the neighbors (a custom of the time) for the last time after which she went into her famous seclusion at home only seeing those who dropped by. See her beautiful poem, The Soul Selects Her Own Society for all we have, really, of her state of mind regarding perhaps these social moments among other things, metaphysical souvenirs of a haunting loveliness.