Foreboding in Paradise

Foreboding in Paradise

Presentiment

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

Indicative that suns go down;

The notice to the startled grass

that darkness is about to pass.

A foreboding of the day for no reason at all. The day invited itself in with a bright sunny smile; green leafed reaching to the sky and each cardinal point. : It reverberated life. Pond is perfectly clear. Food in the cupboard. Money in the bank. Health good. Life is even and smooth; yet, there was an odd foreboding in the air, as if something was afoot in the cosmos. Strange, I looked to the floor and under the bed which appeared to be built on a solid block of stone. Granite, to be precise, not from the Granite State, but north near Randolph, a block at least 6 feet long and a few feet wide -- coffin sized. Yet, I was not ready to die nor was even thinking of this when I opened my eyes today. I sat up and had a cup of black bitter French Roast coffee and thought of illicit love. The mirror caught part of my image… unshaved, wild haired, and naked: Who would want to make love to him.

Yesterday, I visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst by chance, I was on my way to a massage parlor a few meters from Miss. Dickinson’s home and though I was ready for a sensuous indulgence I saw the sign for her home a large yellow handsome brick house of a wealthy family and the spinster Aunt who spun poems that too few read. In the garden was an immense oak easily a century in years, perhaps even more, it reached out generously to all points of the compass, small garden paths, purple flowers, tiny white daisies, the lawn and the bushes precisely trimmed. The day was overcast, the garden sequestered in shadows, and the filtered shadowy light obscured by a massive oak.

Was the seed of this tree spawned when Miss. Emily walked these grounds? Imagination and reality are so imprecise when they converge. The private letters of an intensely private woman were on display, though too few revealed her truest longings, and the barest outlines of desire were written on the periphery of her words. Were they so imbedded deeply knit into the fabric and integument of the word fused to the paper that the true amorous passions were quite still? Did Miss. Emily ever caress herself and wonder of love’s ardor?

Who was this reclusive poet? A tubercular romantic waiting by the window watching the world pass by? On this small road a few carriages and horses passed each hour, a clatter of leather harnesses and metal, the high stepping hooves, the whir of the carriage wheels as they bounced along the road from town, and the sounds reached up to the second floor where Emily sat and wrote a poem about the Eternal Footman waiting. Many of her poems were about expectations, windows and the perspective of time, who looks in and who appears out, and the disintegration of time. While the United States was bounding forward like an unleashed adolescent, she withdrew further and further into the privacy of her words. I am jealous of her privacy. Writing demands intimacy, but the whore that I am loves to have group sex on stage. My words and imaginings are lovers and in truth, I prefer our trysts and rendezvous, assignations in lofts and garrets, as a sotto voce whisper hidden beneath well worn cotton sheets.

Curious, the roles and places we choose in life, she chose this monastic life cloaked as a spinster poetess who wove her poems mostly in secret. It was a strange slightly disquieting visit that was oddly at the same time quite serene. I peered back into the life of a woman who lived a hundred years ago and then, without realizing it, felt a quiet foreboding today and wondered of the granite block beneath my bed.