Visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
Emily Dickinson
She tells us we’ve just missed the 11am
tour, which is not what I want to hear
after driving down windy western Mass
route 2 and delving deep into long-lived
patterns marital communication and I
haven’t had enough coffee to have lived
this much this early in the day. And I know
we are surrounded by green and small-town
silence and miles and miles from the war
that is home, but I want to scream at the
lady who says we’ve missed our window to
see the desk of the woman I think of every
single day. Is there another tour today?
my beloved asks and she says yes at 1
and he says that’s perfect we’ll have lunch
and you can write, what better place to
write than down the street from the woman
you admire and I don’t tell him it’s more
like the woman who inspires me though
our lives are nothing alike. Still, I feel
her and want to see where the words
arrived and then were written and were
sewn and then hid. And we find a cafe
and drink coffee and eat tofu salads
and think about love and that quote by
Garcia Marquez about knowing his
wife less the longer he knew her. And I
feel so stale surrounded by Amherst students
debating Trump’s recent visit to Qatar and
how German is complicated and if there
will ever be peace in Ukraine. And two
hours later I see the tiny desk where the
tiny woman wrote her 1800 poems and
after we walk hand in hand through her
garden and I squeeze his—which is
the only way I can say thank you.
Tara Zafft is a writer and educator and most recently Winner of the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. She received a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK. She has published in the anthology, Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press.
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
Emily Dickinson
She tells us we’ve just missed the 11am
tour, which is not what I want to hear
after driving down windy western Mass
route 2 and delving deep into long-lived
patterns marital communication and I
haven’t had enough coffee to have lived
this much this early in the day. And I know
we are surrounded by green and small-town
silence and miles and miles from the war
that is home, but I want to scream at the
lady who says we’ve missed our window to
see the desk of the woman I think of every
single day. Is there another tour today?
my beloved asks and she says yes at 1
and he says that’s perfect we’ll have lunch
and you can write, what better place to
write than down the street from the woman
you admire and I don’t tell him it’s more
like the woman who inspires me though
our lives are nothing alike. Still, I feel
her and want to see where the words
arrived and then were written and were
sewn and then hid. And we find a cafe
and drink coffee and eat tofu salads
and think about love and that quote by
Garcia Marquez about knowing his
wife less the longer he knew her. And I
feel so stale surrounded by Amherst students
debating Trump’s recent visit to Qatar and
how German is complicated and if there
will ever be peace in Ukraine. And two
hours later I see the tiny desk where the
tiny woman wrote her 1800 poems and
after we walk hand in hand through her
garden and I squeeze his—which is
the only way I can say thank you.
Tara Zafft is a writer and educator and most recently Winner of the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. She received a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK. She has published in the anthology, Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press.
