Before the Holidays, 1995

Before the Holidays, 1995
I am stapled to this paper
that won't let me
say what I am reaching towards:
a generous room with soft
rose-colored carpet
and no more words needing
to be written.

I can't go home
yet, am stuck
in this cold
New England woman's mind,
stranded in her one stingy room
of a Puritan house,
laboring in this chilled
forbidding, midwestern town
for the 25 (below, wind-chill factor)
more pages of Emily Dickinson.

It's torturous
listening to my written voice
posing as authoritive
watching the pen
move in and out of darkness
wondering if I will dream
her words and mine tonight
knowing that tomorrow
I will eat them for breakfast,
with a little butter to take the edge
off her awe and a pinch of sugar
to sweeten her black-coffee bitterness.

If I only owned a computer
I could wrap modern
technology around me
like a rose-colored baby blanket.
And forgo those
freezing eight blocks
of heat loss and skin buckling
at the unforgiving elements.

I fold up in the face
of my self-sabotage anyway,
voice in my head that says:
you can't do it!
It overpowers me like the weather
the "Burglar! Banker - Father!"*
the poverty of loans and anxiety
of deadlines and doubts about my talent.

Whenever I venture out
I always come back again to this
one room with books that don't help
and my Imperial Ego that always
says I am better than anything
I've written and this scarred dark
Salvation Army desk
where I am trapped.

I am tethered to this paper,
stuck
out in the cold
like some poor dull
brown animal who plods
through the drifts
dying of the temperature
and not noticing it, for she
grows numb with uncertainty,
loses all sense
of direction, no answers
available and she'll never
get safely home again.
*The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson #49