In 1887
the white peacocks came and watched the dance of death in the garden
and tea was served

–oh this was far away
In Dutchess County, New York
In the humid summer
green fields, green trees, wet black bark, black dirt
mansions of polished stone

And she danced, spinning
the hem of her white dress flying out

and the peacocks cocked their heads this way
and that
to view her

A perspiring gentleman sitting near the boxwood hedge crunched gently
on a shortbread
as the music soared

Beyond the hedge the top of the Irish maid’s cap was seen
moving to and fro
until suddenly it stopped
and her head blossomed, neckless
above the hedge
grey eyes astonished
as she too watched

While the slender albino girl spun in the sun
her slippers barely touching the flagstone patio
her blonde hair slipping from its jeweled chignon
her bare arms gleaming

The chamber group on the long porch
breaking free from their cadenced harmony
into something unknown
and jungly

But the white peacocks were unsurprised.
Instead, like applause
their long delicate tail feathers began to spread
and spread
and spread

immaculate
incandescent

pluming into the world

And what did the girl see, whirling?

White white white white
Everywhere light
sliding through veiled light and
light sluicing
the white agate of  horizon
and white
crackling with terrible purity
eclipsing sight

incantatory
dazzling

Fall
on your knees

in her white silk dress
with her dress hem streaming out

Fall
on your knees

She is flying

and we cannot catch her
and we cannot catch her

and then
the peacocks begin to scream.

[This poem was written by E, my daughter, age 5. She dictated it to me, and then I pared it down and shaped it, and here it is. The words are all her own.]

Now here everything is tuttle. Tuttle means everything
is in its place. Eyes for seeing, mouth for eating
ears for hearing, legs
for walking a long way from the farm all the way to sinker-bok.

Sinker-bok is mud.

                                                     *

cats

their whiskers help feel anything in this house

and their body helps them get inside of their bones
and their bones help them eat

and the last part is their smile
the smileness of their smileness helps them smile
the cat has a sense of eyes and their eyelashes

and their bodies love everything even their words inside

dog

the dog has some smell to help them smell every way of their smellness.

The dog has lost its temperature. Temperature means
that sad went all the way down into its stomach and
it had no people.
But the sadness is not good. It helps them die.

Whatever it is don’t go near
dogs because it helps them die. 
If you get near dogs if they’re bad or good you can’t keep them.

For a long way there’s dogs

 bird

the mouth helps them taste cold worms and hot worms and even short worms
and their head helps them get messy
helps them see a long time

and the body is the important thing of the world

and the really important thing is the foot
and no one can believe that anyone can believe

that birds have feet and
the feet help them
walk

  pig

the pig ears are the most wonderful things in the world
the head helps them—smartness comes out

and they can smell air or dreams a long way down in the mud

and their body helps them eat inside
and their legs–the important one–to walk

to South America.

                                                         *

…and that’s what the conference is. Thank you.

…even their mouth is up and down even the conference is smart,

thank you.

Not here. Never was.
Vapor.
Drifting

(Through the open window:
Cars sigh down a damp street
an outcast dove coos to itself in the stone courtyard
black leaves rustle against the gray skin of sky )

But from me
no sound

Not here.
Never was.

Instead:
Sinking
down through slow green currents
where sleep-fish nibble dreams
and words unfurl like languid seaweed

past columns of light
where ghost-fish, ghost-selves
weave through kelp forests and
bone-white ruins
to the mystery of chambers beyond

Gliding
along the marine floor
in and out of light and shade
in and out of now and then
in and out of maybe and never-was

Down here
everything is possible
everything is probable
everything ever imagined at any time in the history of the world
now exists
all at once
and without end.

I’m not here. I never was.
Just vapor.
Drifting.

(Through the open window:
A sound like tearing cloth rends the sky
the dove’s complicated contralto is sliced
mid-note
light torches the world yet again)

“So that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold
which though perishable
is tested by fire”

This is an excerpt from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” from Glass, Irony and God, which gives a moving and unusual look at Emily Bronte:

WHACHER

Whacher,
Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,
has caused confusion…

 But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

 She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”
records Charlotte in 1828.
Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,
suggests a third. Meanwhile
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,
out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.
She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary
or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)
and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon
in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,
walking the moor
or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.

“Like two dim forests edging together the Now and the Then stood, almost silent. What strange animals crept to the verge of each and stared at one another from their own territories?  What rough or velvet coats, and fearful eyes, bright claws and teeth, did each side see? Their shadows wove together and their sunlight and moonlight were the same, but they never approached each other, never mated.”

–an excerpt from “Seven-Days Monologue” by Elizabeth Bishop, quoted in essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Bramble Bushes” in the book Modern Poetry After Modernism, by James Logenbach.