When we were very young,
we heard an Emily Dickinson poem
being recited by our teacher,
then we looked around the classroom at each other.
Later, I graduated to reading one
of her poems every morning
before I rose from my bed with the dawn.
Once in a famous library,
I was allowed to hold a letter she’d written,
and when no one was looking,
I shook it a little, the way
it might have trembled in her hand,
then it began to tremble in mine.
Another time—
and this is harder to believe—
before giving a talk about her
at a university in Rome,
I was introduced by an Italian astronaut
who spoke not from the podium
but from the orbiting space station
saying nice things about me,
as he floated on a big screen,
on holiday from gravity.
Behind him, an oval window
was radiant with the sun’s spotless light.
Then he read one of Emily’s poems
from a slip of paper in his hand.
There is a solitude of space,
a solitude of sea…
a solitude of death…Finite infinity.
And when he waved goodbye,
I waved back like a schoolboy
from the front row of the auditorium
in Trastevere, near the flowing Tiber,
then I stood up and gave my earthling talk.
Afterward, a woman told me
the astronaut was none other
than Paolo Nespoli,
who had spent an entire year in space
and who was said to have been
the final lover of the late Oriana Fallaci.
Imagine that, I said to myself,
looking up at the evening sky,
her little poem still circling the globe
at seventeen thousand miles an hour,
hands-down the fastest poem in history
if such records were kept,
passing over everything below
once every ninety-three minutes
including the Vatican and the Colosseum,
not to mention the leafy canopy
of Amherst, Massachusetts, and her small grave
and headstone in the West Cemetery
behind an iron fence, just down an unpaved road.