by Laura Rodley
What would Emily say? The driveway to her brother Edward’s home
is gated, the property surrounded with orange crisscrossed plastic
fencing, plastic not yet invented in her time, nor the cure for her kidney
ailments. Today her condition would have been aggravated by the chlorine
and other astringent agents the town uses to clean the water pumped
to the homes. She would have drunk water from an artesian well
in her Victorian home, writing poems at two a.m., loving someone
she could not have, not from the future, but from her own time period.
Was she ever pregnant as some suggest? Was she virginal as her white
dresses? Did she actually suffer from hypertension? Was she able
to see the future? Her poems crossed realms of time and space.
Would she have cut the crisscrossed orange fence, crushed it down,
or felt more secure to be enclosed, secure in her hermitage
peopled with family, cooks, and Irish workmen, six of whom carried
her casket to her grave in West Cemetery, where she walked in the evenings.
She was nourished by a garden that is no longer open to the public
due to Covid. A garden that fed her, kept her poetry
alive, already passed through the gates into other’s hands through letters.
Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.