Hamlet is going to be part of the play that I am writing, so I needed to buy my own copy. I went to the used book store near Safeway and found an old copy for $1.50. I didn’t have cash with me so the old man working there said that I could just owe him.
Went back again yesterday to pay him back, among other things, and we started talking about poetry. He pointed out a Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. I’m usually not much of a fan, but a radio program that I had heard over the summer about her, reading other strange women poets like Anne Sexton, and the “art is a house that tries to be haunted” made me pick it up. She really is a very strange poet for her time – deceptively sing-song with odd breaks and capitalization, and I’m wondering more and more about her as a person.
Read Hamlet last night and realized that Ophelia is a poet, or a prophet… which ties in even more with the stuff I’ve already been looking into. It’s a strange and beautiful thing when connections turn up like this. But anyway, here’s a Dickinson poem that I probably had heard before but now seemed exactly right:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
for future reference 