Mrs. Dickinson Waits in the Car

Dawn Potter

My Mother does not care for thought—

                                    Emily Dickinson

A few meager stars, a hazy moon

brighter than old Kentuck,

and a bulge of frost spooned

across the windshield like a plucked,

flash-frozen chick. Into this arctic

chariot, the heater chafes and spouts

its idiot vows. Yes, I lied about Kentuck.

No doubt, it’s glowing like all get-out,

like a pair of gibbous moons, like molten

honey dripped into a summer lake.

Blame art, then: I’ve been soaking up Bolton’s

poems, and now I’m acting like a fake

southerner, which is to say gothically

depressed while making love to every rum-

soaked predicate I meet. Treat gothically

as a ringer for New England numb.

Today a friendly rube lauded my skill

at prosy contemplation, but what a crock.

Call a heart a spade: call me a fading, moody kill-

joy with a romance eye for loss and schlock.

The car fan chatters hopelessly; newsmen

chant wind-chill rates and hockey stats.

Like any hausfrau I fret over loaves in the oven,

socks on the line, carboys of milk, and ruinous vats

of soup. There they burn or boil.

Here I dally in this wrapper-strewn capsule,

this (laugh with me!) bell jar. Can I stand loyal

to her, cruel queen of diction, and also rule

my roost, my squat piratical outpost?

I shiver; I prop my tome of poems

against the cruiser’s plastic wheel. I boast

that they age for me: these jeroboams

of syntax, these sherry cups of rage.

Yet these tired hands; yet these cold feet.

Go ahead: remind me to shut up, to flip the page,

to change the station, to bleat

            of Mother’s lonely vigil.

I’m not proud of my idle arrogance.

Meanwhile, the rye loaf chars and the milk spills.

            They’re out of my ken, for a hatful of minutes.

                        Let me claim to be oracular.

“Poetry is not like reasoning,” urges Shelley.

And I reply: “nothing in particular”

            is the maiden speech of every tragedy.

[forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]