Here are the last two stanzas of a poem about
snakes by Emily Dickinson.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Zero at the bone. Read it and know that Emily
Dickinson wrote that line. She closed her eyes, swayed gently back and forth in
her wooden chair, and unhooked whatever part of her mind needed to be loosed
from the constricting hold of standard English usage. Then she put the words
“zero at the bone” on paper where they are as alive today as ever they were.
The first time I read it, I took a sharp breath
and froze. I didn’t dare exhale. I held onto my delight like a pot smoker
holding a lungful. My first coherent thought was, “I could marry the woman who
wrote that SIGHT UNSEEN.” If she could write zero at the bone, we’d figure out a
way to make the rest of it work. Admittedly, I have a reputation for wildly
passionate outbursts laden with hyperbole and suggestions that are impossible
given the limitations of space and time, but you understand what I meant.
Apparently English was Ms. Dickinson’s
own personal sock puppet. She slipped an entire language over her hand and used
it to entertain children from her porch on Saturday afternoons.
I was one of the boys there in Amherst, playing
at draughts and jack straws until Ms. Emily stole onto the back porch to
entertain us. It was wondrous. It was completely unexpected. It was a
revelation, and we knew that the world would never be the same again. What that
woman did with one hand and a sock made us laugh and cheer. It brought joy to
our hearts up until the moment she went back inside and left her sock lying limp
on the porch steps. The children gathered around it, whispering and pointing.
One of them poked at it with a stick.
But I was different. I lifted my eyes from the
sock and sought the woman herself. I caught a glimpse of her as she disappeared
into the house. All I saw were her wrist and hand, but they were slender and
lovely and graceful beyond all description. And I was forever changed.
For though I was but a boy, my heart beat
faster as I thought about what kind of woman could write like that.
rlp
Read the entire poem.
