The Belle of Amherst

Jennifer Miller

Have you imagined me like a spectre

or delicate like baby’s breath, pressed

into the folds of my little handsewn books?

I told you I was nobody.

It wasn’t words, at first, that begged me to stick

them to the page, but flowers.

They called out to me on my meadow wanderings

on those days when the bedroom felt too close

and the air became like a gauze about my head.

I could hear the shouts of asters

and the whispers of jasmine clearer

than any preacher’s sermon.

It is something to be named and brought out

of one’s place and set beside others,

which makes this work seem like violence,

this pasting and pinning down.

But you see it now, don’t you?

How I needed to order the world

I could touch, while another one opened up

inside my brain, wider than the sky,

deeper than the sea.*

*from Emily Dickinson's "The Brain—is wider than the Sky"