May, Merely

MAY, MERELY

 

                    The weeds pant

like the center of summer.

              I follow my nose

       to the dogwood in bloom:

 

                    it is May

merely, but Amherst blossoms

              in its early heat,

       sap oozes from the bark,

 

                    and the limbs

are heavy with what may be:

              phantom fruit, the seed

       in the dusty pollen.

 

-- Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco

 

From "A Sampler of Hours," in Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson's Letters Together with Essays on the Subject by Various Hands, edited with an introduction by Lewis Turco, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (www.SUNYPress.edu), 1993. ISBN 0-791414-17-5, cloth; ISBN 0-791414-18-3, paper. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007.