Thursday, December 9, 2010

Romanticism

BY DAVID BAKER
It is to Emerson I have turned now,   
damp February, for he has written   
of the moral harmony of nature.   
The key to every man is his thought.   
But Emerson, half angel, suffers his   
dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled
that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her

head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life   
suffer from the warfare between the force   
& delicacy of her soul & the
weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th,   
1832, of an evening strange
with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited
Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.

—Emerson looking in, clutching his key.   
Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild   
fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing   
as if stunned by persistent cold wind   
or leaning over, as from rough breath.   
I have brought my little one, bundled and   
gloved, to the lonely place to let her run,

hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened   
along the ground hard from a winter drought.   
I have come out for the first time in weeks   
still full of fever, insomnia-fogged,
to track her flags of breath where she’s dying   
to vanish on the hillsides of bramble
and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal,

one or two sparrows, something with yellow—
scatter in small explosions of ice.
Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased   
by the physical crunch of the ground, damp   
from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot,   
that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath   
too rocky to cultivate, covered thick

with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze
not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled,
—that half of him for whom nature was thought.   
Kate has found things to deepen her horror   
for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled   
by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle   
of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick

bramble, or the bramble itself enough
to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood-
colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa.
What does she see when she looks at such things?   
I do not know what is so wrong with me
that my body has erupted, system
by system, sick unto itself. I do

not know what I have done, nor what she thinks   
when she turns toward her ill father. How did   
Emerson behold of his Ellen, un-
embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands?   
Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are   
to find out the secrets of our own natures.   
Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night

with his journal, the awful natural
fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been
deeper sacrifice than a sacrament.
Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down   
like light snow on the beautiful hills?   
Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . .
—His other half worried by the wording.