Partly why I remain a renegade of the blogosphere is that I've not yet learned my Milton, not only "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" but his bang-up "On the Late Massacre of the Piedmontese." You must learn these if you're is going to spend any time on line at the Post Office, me having never been much good for toting something like a book. And I got hung up on Milton as a result of having gotten hung up on swimming, long story, hole in body, surgery etc.



So now my skin has been remade entire, and I plan to swim as soon as the slush melts, tomorrow maybe. But in this week of holing up I've been thinking about my essay on birds, the one that exists 92% in my head. Emily Dickinson's going to be in it, and whipping through her each time I always find a lot of poems that are new. This time I also got a sense of the sweep of the work: as far as birds go, and she goes far, her work seems to utilize them a lot at its beginnings, and then she moves to more metaphysical subject matter, which makes sense, if we accept the myth that she became more and more agoraphobic--windows will only take you so far. This is sad, to contemplate how the physical constraints of a life also control its artistic production, and it was in protest of this idea that I decided, this fall, to keep track of the birds as they migrate in and out of town (would have been a better idea last winter, when the weather was fair...)



A couple of days ago in the freak storm we did go look off the point, where the ducks were huddled in the bay. Very close and still, immobile.



It's clear that Dickinson equates her poetic gift with bird song, and toward the end of her life she knows she's shutting down (from the whirlwind years of her younger adulthood.) Here is a good short one, #1478:



One note from One Bird

Is better than a Million Word -

A scabbard has - but one sword



I guess this is sad: her self-knowledge of her own winding down. It is the subject of #1089:



The Opening and the Close

Of Being, are alike

Or differ, if they do,

As Bloom opon a Stalk-



That from an equal Seed

Unto an equal Bud

Go parallel, perfected

In that they have decayed -