Emily Dickinson’s Maid Remembers

I churned the butter for the bread she made.

I filled the lamps she lit, then wiped away the soot.

Sometimes she even wrote the way I spoke—English balanced

on my Irish tongue—“Your letter this wet evening was a great

treat to me”—my words woven with hers, tucked

between dashes until I could no longer tell the difference.

Me in the kitchen, her in the pantry, we talked

as Girls do—Fond and late, though we were not girls

and I knew more of her than she ever did of me,

my memories of Ireland dissolving like ink in dishwater

or slops, Tipperary County, Ireland, the Mountain

of Women all places it seemed I had dreamed.

Emily lost herself in a reverie of making—

corn cakes, gingerbread, wine jelly molded in patterns

of roses or wheat—paper and pencil beside

the pastry board, her muse domestic but never small,

inspiration a cloud of flour in her hands, then a white wing—

her favorite verbs transformative: stir, sift, dissolve.

She wrote on scraps of anything—invitations, candy

wrappers, circulars, envelopes, lists. As the bread rose,

so did the phrases, words jotted like recipes—to make

a prairie it takes a clover and one bee equal to the rice cake

she made for company, nothing too small for that hot-as-coal

-in-the-stove attention, no boundary line to art.

If you look for me in her letters, you’ll only see a glimpse—

Maggie—warm and wild and mighty,

Maggie—good and noisy, the North Wind of the Family,

but Sweets without a Salt would at the last cloy.

I saved her from housework.

I brought her the world.

When her cherry bureau filled with poems—drafts

held together with straight pins like squares for a quilt—

I offered the trunk I’d brought from Ireland as storage

for the ones she’d finished and sewn into little books.

She made me promise to destroy them when she died.

Did she ask knowing I would disobey her?

Her sister burned her letters as requested.

But those poems were the world where we’d lived,

that green and yellow kitchen—a gift shop now—

a place where dreams were couriers, her words

about them ferocious, combustible, too alive to unsay.

I could not bring myself to do it.

I saved the only picture of her too—

that daguerreotype one no one liked,

but by which the world now knows her.

I couldn’t give up that direct gaze, like the Sherry

in the Glass, the severe part in the chestnut hair,

the velvet ribbon crossed each day at her throat.

sweat-soaked batiste gown, bathed the narrow, cinnamon-

freckled body no man had wed, listening until the end

for what she did and did not say, her way ever slant

and indirection. Thirty years, I worked in that house,

seventeen beside her. California beckoning, I never

meant to stay. But a community of feeling

sprang up between us, the Invisible grown neighborly.

There’s Ransom in a voice, she said once, as I know

there’s voltage in a charge. The busy wicks our lives

were made the whole house bright. But it’s the kitchen

I remember, door open on her garden, how all our

summer afternoons to me have had so many wings.