Might I but moor – Tonight – With Thee

Fast and flimsy sex and still not
able to sleep, but she has fallen –

under the covers to the other world.

I move down the cold, dark passage
where every move I make echoes twice.

I was reading about Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who prepared the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems in 1890. He wrote to his co-editor: “One poem only I dread a little to print – that wonder ‘Wild Nights,’ – lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there. . . . Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted.”

That comment made me look at the poem again and think about Emily – that virgin recluse – fantasizing in her room one night when she couldn’t sleep.

Emily’s poem:

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the Winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor –
Tonight – With Thee!

Emily Dickinson

Flesh and Stone

This stone is like flesh, but cold.
She needs to warm to the idea.
He grips her thigh and pulls her.

Her flesh is like warm stone, but
she is cold to all his ideas.

Day For Night

It is a trick of the filmmaker.

Underexposed in-camera or darkened during post-production.

Daylight masquerading as night, with blue tint.

Friendship for love, or sex for passion.

I know both on this American night.

 

Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Léaud in La Nuit Américaine

“Day for night” is a set of cinematic techniques used to simulate a night scene while filming in daylight. I learned about this deception when I saw Francois Truffaut‘s 1973 film, Day for Night whose original title is La Nuit Américaine meaning “American night” which is the French term for day-for-night shooting.