R.T.’s essays on poetry at www.poems.com
For more poetry
R. T. Smith
That Art Might Save a Few
Miss Harkness, bless her spindly frame
and icy hair, said poetry would make us more
alive, but we swapped gossip or watched the rain
graying the windows. A gentle spinster
thin as a mummy, she was the color
of faded paper and flinched like a bird.
She insisted Dickinson made poems from rigor
and need and a perfect spark. The words
had a lovers’ quarrel with one another.
She called the famous recluse “Miss Emily”
and said the dark would soon be after us,
and we’d better lay aside dry tinder
for those times. We thought it made no sense
when she said those poems were precise
as a silver pillbox, that each one held a tempest.
We passed notes and whispered until the lights
flickered in the aftermath of thunder.
“Study the diction,” she advised and smiled,
