I haven't been awake for days

I do not know what to make of the dark spots on the sidewalk.

Tepid black shapes. A circle of some kind. Emily Dickinson used to talk to guests through her closed door.

I do not know if they are the scars of leaves in the cement. I have a thing for the scars of leaves. I want to write about them for pages and pages. Emily Dickinson used to invite people over to play the piano for her. Her sister would escort them in and they'd play to an empty Emily-less room. Part of me loved typing Emily-less.



I do not know if they are the last vestiges of gum that has been ground down into nothing, like bones turned to ash. I've been reading essays lately that sound like poems. Many of them talk about bones and ashes. Emily Dickinson and I both enjoy the word slant, though I'm prone to overuse it in conjunction with light without ever really getting anywhere.

I do not know if they are the low places where water gathers and eats away at asphalt. In no way shape or form am I comparing my own writing to Emily Dickinson's. I would say that I'm something closer to Richard Jobson. The last sentence is patently untrue. One of the sentences in this post is the closest approximation to truth.

I get depressed whenever someone says, "I need to take a vacation from my vacation." Repetition is both the mother of memory. And the rain that beats relentlessly at a child's window while he dreams of playing in the yard. (Here's where if I was writing a piece of fiction I'd include something about rust colored leaves).

Sometimes, when I am alone, I am still scared of the dark. I've no earthly clue if Emily Dickinson was scared of the dark. It seems unlikely. I imagine that people in previous centuries had a different relationship to darkness.

I am often wrong.

If the world was flat we'd have to worry less about resources.

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. His arrival helped to spawn the European incursion that pretty much killed off the native people groups. We never said the latter part in school. It's not as pithy.

At some point in the past I read a few poems by Emily Dickinson.

A teacher once told me that I was stupid to not consider titles more carefully. The title of this post is ostensibly inexplicable.

Emily Dickinson did not title her poems.

Emily Dickinson got people to play piano to an absent host. She was not stupid.

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

Emily Dickinson