print previewback SUE D. BURTON
Somehow Myself Survived the
Night
And entered with the Day—
—Emily Dickinson
the guy in the front row up in that little town near the border, who
when Jack got out his saw, lunged at the stage—I want somebody
to lunge from my heart—he was going to save me. In the box, I
think about Emily, off in her room. Her white dress, her prolific
Death-pounding-in-her-head phase. I don’t know what it is to enter
the day. Once when I was a kid, a heifer charged when we were
getting it into the truck and I cut my arm on a rusted hitch. Emily
entered with the day. Entered what? The self survived and entered
what? Well, the poems changed. No more clanging in the brain—
no more racket. For me, the other side of night is Bernardo Daddi’s
trecento gold sky. Red. Layers of red clay beneath the gold leaf. So
it shines. When I cut my arm, first there was red, and then the gold
sky, like piercing a Daddi from the back. 
All in All, Another Productive Day in the Thicket of
Disappointment
Somehow Myself Survived the
Night
The Woman Who Is to Be Sawn in Half
The Woman Who Is Sawn in Half Thinks about
Elephants: Marianne Moore Feeding Them Bread
at
the Circus & Houdini Who Made One Disappear (&
Was Not "Uncomfortably Popular" with
Them as
Was Miss Moore)