Emily Dickinson Museum (house and grounds), Amherst, MA
Half of Emily’s autumnal garden is sunlit at midmorning, but the little apple and pear trees in the orchard down the hill are shrouded in shadow, and I think of my face as equinox: how I woke last April to thorny vines in my neck coiling up my ear canal, with a numb tongue and drooping left lip and eye: a pox, a palsy on my seventh cranial nerve, inflamed and swollen in its bony channel, its roots and delicate capillaries choked off: Then Space – began to toll, // as all the Heavens were a Bell, / and Being, but an Ear…
