DELINQUENT PALACES

Browsing through Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival, I came upon an epigraph to the chapter “A Mile from Hell”:

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces—

Ravished by the phrase “Delinquent Palaces,” I looked up the rest. Because the poem spoke so powerfully to me in the context of my life, I ended up misreading it – a fact I discovered only when John Guzlowski (a professor of American literature) pointed out the standard interpretation. I am still tempted to think that the religious interpretation, though most plausible, is perhaps not the only one after all – the loss might be multiple, and maybe even different from what Emily herself tried to narrow it down to.

A loss of something ever felt I—
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was—of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out—

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is—
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces—

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven—

~ Emily Dickinson, 959, c. 1864

But let me briefly be an eccentric misguided reader just for the pleasure of it. The intoxicating phrase, “Delinquent Palaces,” made me remember something delicious:

We stand over the black

gleam of the canal,

weeping willows on both sides;

a statue with a raised saber behind us,

poised to lead a charge.

The royal park is dark,

except one row of windows

in a palace where secret talks

are being held between

America and China.

~ Oriana (the opening stanzas of “Secret Talks” © 2012)

This memory goes back to the years of the Cold War when the U.S. and China had no official diplomatic relations. The two powers were talking in secret, however. The talks took place in the smaller of the two royal palaces in Warsaw’s Lazienki Park, then and even now one of the places I’d equate with heaven. 

On this beautiful overcast morning, the sky blank (I’ve come to accept blank sky as almost fog – how have I been able to live with so little fog?) – with this sky like a blank page, I could almost ask, “Where does heaven start?” – coming from a language in which “sky” and “heaven” are the same word, as in most languages. And the answer comes instantly: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” It’s not a place. It’s a state of mind.

“IT’S PRETTY TO THINK SO”

But something in us craves a tangible, breathable place as well, with paths to walk on. Heaven used to be defined as an actual place, up in the clouds. I think that in Dickinson’s times, no one questioned the idea of heaven as a place. That’s why she says,” the site of the Kingdom of Heaven.” The “within you” state-of-mind definition had to wait two millennia for a modern psychological worldview, and is still far from being embraced by those who are thrilled with the idea that “in my end is my beginning” (although, as Milosz observed, it’s pretty impossible to convince a modern person that real life begins after death).  

Even now, in the twenty-first century, millions of people yearn for an actual place to go to once the body is dead. Of course nobody wants a place of suffering, but an enchanting domain, a fabulous kingdom with a thousand mansions, a city with streets of gold, or a garden with fruit trees similar to the Garden of Eden. If not that, the dead might settle for going to Paris, or returning to whatever town or village they loved most. There is no guarantee, but, as Jake says in The Sun Also Rises, “It’s pretty to think so.”

Lilacs in bloom in Lazienki Park

For me, the heavenly city was my favorite part of Warsaw, the wide avenue that goes past the Lazienki Garden. The loss of Warsaw came to symbolize all loss – of rich human connections, intellectual stimulation, the energy of a great city and my “owning” those parks and avenues, owning even its church bells and baroque clouds – and those rows of small curly clouds we called baranki, little lambs. All the losses and disappointments that followed were added to the huge compound loss of losing Warsaw and all it offered. When I contemplated that loss and the rest that followed, I wasn’t a mere mile from hell; I was fully in hell, brooding on everything that went wrong in my life. And that brooding was the opposite of heaven understood as a state of mind. That’s why I read “oppositely” as “the opposite of”; being a mourner and a dispossessed princess who’s continually “still softly searching” for those “delinquent palaces” closes the rainbow gate to a joyful state of mind.

“Oh, it’s about her loss of the Kingdom of Heaven,” was all that John needed to say to bring me around to the standard interpretation, shattering my seeing the remembered palaces as the landscapes and cityscapes of the lost childhood and early youth. In terms of Emily’s life, a case could be made that the speaker was thinking of the death of her childhood friend, Sophia Holland (it’s an interesting coincidence that “Sophia” means “wisdom”), or perhaps the lack of love from her depressed mother and distant father; still, the most plausible interpretation is indeed the religious one, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. The fifth stanza ("Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting") sets forth the idea that the human soul comes from heaven, and can at first remember heaven's glories. Then gradually “shades of the prison-house begin to close,” and the vision of splendor fades “into the light of common day” – the ordinary life of quiet desperation, as Thoreau would later say. 

Does adult life have to be so constrained with hardship? Shouldn't there be more time for joy? 

Wiman comments: “ ‘A loss of something ever felt I,’ Emily Dickinson wrote, who could never quite bring herself to call that ‘something’ God, though she sensed the source of that loss was as early as her earliest memories: ‘Too young that any should suspect / A Mourner walked among the children.’ If I could trace my own losses back, could read my life by blood and bone, would there be a single source? Do I want that charge again, or the time that it enlivened? Is God merely a synonym for gone?”

The word “charge” seems to refer to Wiman’s experience in church one time, an experience he can’t really recall, but still refers to as “my conversion, when I was so filled and frightened by God that I fled the service deep into the bowels of that Baptist church.” He also says, “Even in my most pious days I detested church.” During the services, he’d become “a hive of nerves, wanting it only to be over.” What riveted him, however, were the stories of radical conversion, usually preceded by a great affliction. The most I can make of it is a yearning for transcendence.

THE SUBLIME: BEAUTY’S BUT THE BEGINNING OF TERROR

Though now and then I wondered what a religious mystical experience might be like, the closest I could come to feeling an intensity of delight so intense that it might be called transcendent was through encounters with the beauty of nature, especially the great energies of nature (what Kant calls the sublime; something that is both beautiful and terrifying; Rilke: “for beauty is but the beginning of terror / we are still barely able to endure, / and we adore it so / because it serenely / disdains to destroy us.”)

Falling in love had some similarity to that – a trance-like feeling of hushed amazement, being startled and mastered by something I didn’t expect. But sooner or later anguish would replace the eerie calm, as if to say that life must go on with all its difficulties. So I’ve settled for moments of beauty as my sufficient nourishment – the critical words here being “moments” and “sufficient.” The sense of loss that was my daily companion is a half-remembered phantom now. But this is already my current self speaking. My earlier self was a mourner – a Mourner with a capital M, in fact. And that was how I kept away from the kingdom that is both within us and around us.

CARRYING BAGS FULL OF SAND

Can a constant feeling of loss be a burden preventing us from enjoying the feast of life? Jane Hirshfield’s “Burlap Sack” gives an answer that speaks to me.

BURLAP SACK

A person is full of sorrow
The way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
But we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
Being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The self is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
And leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
Its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?
  

~ Jane Hirshfield, After  (my thanks to Panhala for both text and image)

**

This is a poem of wisdom rather than a poem that’s delightful as poetry. The message is too explicit, we could argue. As Henry James said, “To be direct is to be inartistic.” But the wisdom is delightful. And perhaps wisdom is a kind of poetry (to steal from Wallace Stevens, who said that money is a kind of poetry). There is imagery here, but no music, and not much surprise once we absorb the initial lesson: to think that grief is the self is an error. Overall the poem doesn’t, ahem, enthrall me. It’s too didactic and general for that (Jack Gilbert often fails in this manner). Still, what the poem says is a gift the way that a compact little essay can be gift, or an aphorism, a mantra that helps us be resilient in adversity.

A person is full of sorrow

The way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand. . . .

To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.

I can’t begin to say how wonderful this observation is. If you happen to be in a place of sorrow, it might be good to write or type these lines in large bold font and tape them to the mirror, to remind yourself that you are not the heavy sack you are carrying. This includes physical afflictions, such as suffering from a chronic illness – you have to keep reminding yourself that you are not the disease; that you are still you, a bright and loving person, funny and generous, passionately interested in poetry and music and astronomy (or whatever it happens to be).

I admit that when you are in the heavy clutches of medicine, it’s difficult to remember that you are not the disease. Difficult but possible, between visits to see the various doctors. And during such times it’s more important than ever, this love for whatever it is that you love, for what carries your essence apart from your affliction.

Just my use of the word “carries” reminded me of the saying that language is fossil poetry, metaphors we no longer even notice. A poet can remind us of what is precious by using images, making us notice the metaphors. Any poet who puts on the page the statement of what is important is writing wisdom poetry. Harold Bloom said, “The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy can never end, and wisdom writing is more poetic than philosophical.”  

True, Jane Hirshfield does use poetic metaphor and imagery to convey her message, and tells us,

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
Being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

~ a reminder that the self carries the grief, but the self is not the grief. The self is not the sack, the side bags, the sand and stones in them (or did we expect the load to be gold and precious stones? In traditions that exalt suffering [Nietzsche: All religions are at bottom a system of cruelties], that would not be far-fetched). As for being careful to give extra room to the side bags when you pass between the trees, that reifies the self-as-mule, and also points out the difficulty of carrying such a load of losses and disappointed expectations.

It’s a full-time job, carrying those bags, jealously preserving the grief, making sure we don’t come too close to anything that might dislodge it – an encounter with the freshness of the present rather than the half-real past. But that’s going beyond the poem, into the marshy terrain of questions such as “Is depression self-limiting, or self-perpetuating and self-enhancing?” It depends on the individual case, and on how the present changes the past – the present that, minute by minute, we still have the power to create.

The ending seems to return to the first statement that the self is not the burdens it carries. In the end, the self is compared to both a bride and a mule (I find this a marvelous conjunction):

What would it be to take the bride
And leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
Its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

BAGS OF SAND VERSUS THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

As if to provide an uncanny illustration for Hirshfield’s poem, a friend of mine had a dream in which he was carrying a burlap bag of sand. He knew it was sand because the bag had SAND printed on it, and a hole in the middle from which sand was seeping out. He had to carry it in his arms, cradled like a baby, to prevent the loss of sand. And the bag was growing heavier by the second.

Fortunately he found the man to whom the bag belonged – a Hassid in full garb – and handed the bag over to him. He felt great relief, but also some loss. Loss? Interesting. Well, we get attached to our burdens. It could be argued that, for all the torture, people may be deriving some sense of meaning from this. In Waiting for Godot, the slave Lucky carried a suitcase full of sand to show that he was a good carrier, and thus shouldn't be sold at an auction. How many of us carry burdens to show that we are such nice good people, so excellent at suffering, and thus we don’t deserve to die?

Even the bride’s dowry – perhaps the weight of expectations – is seen as not much more valuable than sand and stones. It’s wonderful that Jane Hirshfield doesn’t use the modern colloquial term for the stuff we drag along from the past: baggage. By going back to earlier times when a person or a mule carried the bags, she makes the pointlessness of that behavior more vivid and pathetic (and the bags get heavier and heavier the longer we carry them). It’s up to us to interpret what the heavy bags stand for: our possessions? memories of negative events to look over like photo albums? too much responsibility that shouldn’t be ours? Resentment that the richer, larger life that seemed to be our birthright lies somewhere else, and we can’t get there from here?

But what about those palaces in Warsaw? Are they just sand and stones, worthless rubble of memory? No, I want to save those. For some reason, happy memories don’t weigh as much. But even they can become dysfunctional if too much time is spent in the country that now exists only in my mind. There are limits even to nostalgia.

Everyone knows that Hirshfield has a Buddhist orientation, and we can recognize the image of dropping the burden, the sack full of stones and sand, as the moment of enlightenment. But I also see something marvelously American here. The individual is seen as having a great value, even stooped under the burden s/he’s carrying. The soul is a bride, happiest when unencumbered. In the ending of the poem there is, I dare say, the pursuit of happiness.


**
 
My special thanks to John Guzlowski 

Lilith:

The new blog is stunning....I love most the park of blooming lilacs.  That is enough heaven for me, and I have missed lilacs so much since moving to Southern California.

Oriana:

They are heaven. As you can imagine, I spent much time with my face pressed to the Lazienki lilacs! I used to kiss them -- literally. After rain, there'd be tiny rainbows on the blossoms, and I'd lick them off. Lilacs appear in my poems -- whenever I say lilacs, I mean THOSE fabulous Warsaw lilacs, that incredible moist abundance . . . 

After the lilacs are done, chestnut trees begin to bloom, and Warsaw is heaven again, a somewhat different variety. Then the linden trees. The fragrance of the northern plants is glorious.

John sends us this quote:

People living deeply have no fear of death.   ~ Anaïs Nin

Oriana:

There is simply no mental space for that fear – people who live deeply have so much to do and think about. And they feel grateful (to the universe? to life? to their friends? it doesn’t matter to whom or what) for the richness. They feel they’ve had their share – when it’s time to go, they’ll say “I’ve had a great life. In my memory, dance and sing and be happy.” When one of Jung’s daughters died, the mourners waltzed out of the church – according to her wishes.

Charles:

Why shouldn't your interpretation of “delinquent palaces” be just as valid?

My favorite photograph is the woman walking into the sunset. Love the colors.

Oriana:

A literary critic would point out that Dickinson lived in an era when Christians believed that heaven was a place (vaguely depicted , but with palaces a strong possibility); what’s more, they believed that the soul descended from heaven to enter the body as if the soul were given a prison sentence. Life was a Vale of Tears.  In terms of the historical context, the religious interpretation is the most plausible.

But a poem belongs to the reader, and sometimes the reader gets more out of a “strong misreading.” I have an unusually specific vision of my delinquent palaces – I know their exact location. But they have a broader symbolic meaning of something wonderful that we had in childhood and early youth, and then lost. Post-war Poland was full of people who lost something valuable they had before the war – sometimes a city they loved, such as Lvov or Vilnius. That was their very specific Paradise Lost. Immigrants are notorious for idealizing their country of origin, of secretly visiting in their dreams and daydreams those parks and fountains and old churches . Some mourning for lost paradise is only human. It’s only when it interferes with making the best of the present that it becomes dysfunctional. In my misreading, I read the poem as a warning against becoming a perpetual mourner (actually I love Emily’s capitalization here: a Mourner). To be a Mourner is to lose the kingdom of heaven which is in the present.

Yes, the colors in that photograph of a women carrying a sack on her back have a subtlety. The photo is the opposite of hype. The path is dusty; it’s already slipping into the past. 

WHY DICKINSON COULDN’T STOP FOR DEATH

It’s the greatest unasked question in American literature: Why couldn’t Emily Dickinson stop for Death? Too busy tying her bonnet? Or sewing poems into "fascicles," her make-believe publishing? 

None of the above. She couldn’t stop for Death because when death arrives, time stops, and that cannot happen as long as consciousness is ticking on. There is no “point in time” (pace Zeno’s arrow – there is no stopping it). Time is motion. 

Even if we lie down and do nothing, our heart keeps marching on "until the end of time" (our personal time, that is). The atrial valves slam shut, then the ventricular valves. They slam so forcefully -- slam-SLAM, slam-SLAM -- that they produce our iambic heartbeat. (Still, I prefer to think that our thoughts march to a different drummer. When I used to indulge in depression, my thoughts resembled repetitious pantoums.)

Love and writing: our outrageous attempts to stop time and take that ride with Death and Immortality, which is Eros, the anagram of ROSE. Our mad faith in words crumbling not to dust, but pollen.

*

My first love was organ music. I stayed with the poetics of Catholicism until almost fifteen because an aggressive organist loved to make the huge stony church shudder: a whole-body orgasm. 

Then in Krakow, at Saint Anne's, by accident, by grace, a gift. The organist was practicing, but after a while he started playing for his own pleasure. It got more and more ecstatic. The air trembled, everything trembled. Imagine me, love, in that trembling.

*

A soft morning, deepening the two-tone green of the araucaria in front of my window. Thousands of skyward green fingers. If only I could touch you. If I could touch the sky.

*

No monks, at least not visible monks, at San Luis Rey, my nearest Franciscan mission. Wasted, my pink turtleneck, concealed breasts under the burgundy jacket, my hair falling in soft curls à la Magdalena. No monks were outside, no one to spiritually direct me in my very lapsed state. No Fra Raul with dark-burning eyes to bless me (he who’d hinted he could be my spiritual director), no Bro. Lawrence to keep stroking the soft skin just above my wrist, as he scandalously did during my first visit.

I talked only to two staff women: the depressed, osteoporotic one (another victim of the lies told to women about hormone replacement) who showed me a typical room for the retreatants -- two single beds; the motel-like bedspread looked ridiculous. The woman at the gift shop sold me, at half-price, a little cross, all floral motifs, with a diamond-shaped opening at the crossways and an oval crystal hung there – finally all suggestion of crucifixion removed.

I asked the gift-shop woman if there was some ritual at mealtimes (monks eat together with the retreatants and staff). Eagerly she answered, “Oh no. No ritual, no prayer, no reading from the gospels. We are soft Catholics here; we are non-denominational.”

So this is what the Vatican II reforms have led to: a Franciscan monastery calls itself non-denominational. Soon the habits will go -- just watch it. Worst of all, a non-Latin mass that’s only dimly connected to the Jerusalem temple ritual of sacrifice, and looks like a combination of a senior exercise class (let us stand, let us sit, let us kneel) and a vestigial bread-and-wine food demonstration. No Dionysian eating of the god. No trembling orgy of the bells shaken with all might by the altar boys.

There are still those beautiful enclosed gardens, all serenity, still some aura of the sacred. The chapel still has the right twilight, and the red canna lilies around the altar, funneling upward like prayers. So not all poetics yet lost, but I'm afraid that the soft Catholics have almost completely lost the great power that hard Catholics had, precisely the poetics.

I’ve wasted my life in many ways, but specifically by falling into my juvenile atheism when I could have entered Carmel. By now I might have a best-seller about my visions and affairs. 

I think ritual is healing, almost like music. In California, religions fuse effortlessly. In Yogananda’s Meditation Gardens, hummingbirds hover like tiny crucifixes.

*

The night ocean – near the shore all copper sheen from sodium lamps, high surf, tons of glassy water curving and crashing. Not something I would have experienced as an enclosed Carmelite. Being ravished by the sight of the ocean. Copper light licking our bodies as we ride these moments of death and immortality. 

 

How could Emily even imagine she might rejoice in heaven? How to ride those lights, those moons, the music of the spheres? And not to miss the orchard where her life stood, a loaded gun . . .  and no one identified and carried her away. She said, The only thing that ever happened to me was loneliness. The price of everything.

*

When my mother was in her last days, I had a dream of being in her house. The living room was in disarray, bookshelves jammed together at jagged angles. I could barely squeeze through. I picked a book at random, and opened it at random, to the sentence: You must become aware of when time stops.

A New Age friend told me, “Her spirit has already left. What’s here is only a robot.”

*

Einstein said that the faster you travel, the more time slows down. Clocks stop at the speed of light. The richer your life, the longer it seems to last.

But I must affix a caveat: as long as there is the quiet "down time" to contemplate what’s happening. To weave it and unweave it. 

Penelope is memory. What passion greater than Penelope’s patience?  It’s my waiting that creates you, you who are to stop for me. Kindly.

~ Oriana

Una:

Beautiful blog. Having been to the Mission several times though not Catholic I related to all you said. There was a friar in his brown belted frock named Father Rusty when I was there the first time and he had on Birkenstocks. 


Oriana:

I was disappointed to see Fra Raul in jeans rather than brown cassock. True, he was returning from town, but I wanted all things monastic, not secularized. The jeans unnerved me more than, previously, Fra Lawrence's stroking my forearm with total fascination, which I let him do out of charity. He was so distracted by a woman's soft skin that he forgot to say "God bless you" as we were leaving.

Una:

About Emily: I can’t begin to describe how it felt to be in her room with the white dress on a form. She was tiny. Or to touch her little desk. Such a huge spirit in what seemed a Lilliputian body by comparison.

Oriana:

Medieval suits of armor in museums (not the fake ones in antique stores) shock by their tiny size: the knights were five feet tall! In the past, most people did not have the kind of nutrition (especially protein) that it takes to achieve the full genetic height potential. And childhood was more stressful, which apparently also has an effect on adult size. But what is all that next to the fantastic gifts left to us by those physically tiny composers (think of Mozart), those Lilliputian poets (Keats and many others). Reading biographies, I am stunned by how much they suffered -- (Dickinson said, "All that ever happened to me was loneliness"), and how much they accomplished. 

Jon: 

I admit I never understood Emily Dickinson but I always understood her not stopping for death to mean that she just didn't want to acknowledge that she was mortal.

As for hard vs. soft Catholics, my sympathies lie with the soft because I disagree so violently with the church's politics. I also believe that one should understand what one is reciting in church even if it loses some of the mystery. Other people who I respect disagree with this. I see a parallel between your two posts. Just like Poland for you the Latin mass is a lost country.

Oriana:

 

Thanks for your wonderful comment! Actually that interpretation never occurred to me: the poet couldn't "stop for Death" because of the psychological denial of mortality. It makes sense. Judging by her amazing poems, Dickinson had trouble believing in heaven, or, if heaven existed, that it would be a satisfying sort of afterlife.

Yes, you are so right, the Latin mass (of which I understood only some words, and -- strange for a child who wanted to learn all the languages -- didn't desire to understand more) is a lost country for me. It was a part of my childhood that I thought I would always be able to revisit, but no . . .  I still chant it in my mind. My grandmother used to take me to the long High Mass, the sung mass. What an opera it was!

I totally oppose the church's politics. It's the ritual I miss, the poetics.

Also, when hostia became victim in the English translation, the archaic origin of the mass was plain: animal sacrifice. And this is historically true: the liturgy grew out of the animal sacrifice ritual at the Jerusalem Temple. 

Oriana's reply to Marjorie's comment that Emily was too busy.

"Too busy" feels very contemporary. In our manic era, people keep super-busy so they never have the time to think about "life's unanswerable questions," which certainly keeps depression away (and even so, depression is endemic). How do we deal with mortality? By being too busy to think about it. But in Dickinson's times, death struck often. Likewise, it generally didn't take place in a hospital. It was "in your face." There were fewer venues of escape. I suspect people were forced to think about death much more than they are now.

Actually I agree with Freud that the two most important things in life are love and work -- love in the sense of mutually supportive relationships (something many of us experience only in middle age, when we manage to escape from toxic relationships), and work as activities that nourish us, rather than a toxic job that deadens us, or is so exhausting that it feels like giving blood. With luck, we move away from what I call the Vampire Lifestyle -- I don't mean being a vampire, but his/her/its victim: being drained of energy, of joie de vivre and your own life and purpose -- but usually as a willing victim, a collaborative victim.

Dickinson  has many metaphysical poems that end on "we don't know." In this famous poem, the very presence of Immortality inspires hope, even though Eternity remains utterly vague, and no bliss is promised -- unless we take Death's courtesy ("kindly") as a sign that something good awaits. I agree that this ride with Death and Immortality -- a magnificent image that makes this poem unforgettable -- does not inspire dread, even if it doesn't really answer the questions we dare not ask. In this particular poem, Dickinson appears to show a calm acceptance of death. Death comes not as the Grim Reaper, but as a gentleman. And of course Emily would want Death to be a courteous gentleman, just as I imagined a young and handsome Thanatos, endearingly shy, in "April Snow." http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/05/jack-gilberts-end-of-paradise-lenny.html

Note how very different in tone this poem is from Jack Gilbert's "The End of Paradise."

Lucrezia: 

Lots of beautiful writing here. Am thinking at the moment that it is better than poetry, although it is poetry. Lots of sexuality. Poetry =  dreams.

Oriana:

Thank you. I meant it as poetic prose. Lush imagery has a way of coming across as erotic. 

Bill Mohr: 

Your meditation on Dickinson is a prose poem. The last two lines are pure poetry:

Penelope is memory. What passion greater than Penelope's patience? 

It's my waiting that creates you, you who are to stop for me. Kindly.

I look forward to reading Dickinson's letters some day. I was astonished to realize a couple years ago that there is a concordance to her letters. Now that is the sign of a great writer!

Oriana: 

 

Thank you for showing me how the ending would work with line breaks. I think I could transform some of this into a regular poem . .  .