Vivian Shipley

What Lavinia Found in Her Sister's Room

Stacks of quilts, tied into packets like poems, piled edge to center, floor to ceiling. To clear air of Emily's death, Lavinia flooded first Amherst then other parts of Massachusetts in patterns her older sister patched with fingers of her non­-writing hand. Lacing herself from sight, white lacquered to a window, Emily rubbed to clear crystal frost with an eye for pattern or metaphor. Unhooked by words, Emily turned to quilting. Squaring off space, she wasted no time in turning chaos into order or on subtleties of thought that could never quite be expressed. Organizing by color rather than outline, purple provided a thread sometimes in synonyms of iodine, amethyst and tyrian. Emily had rules: never stitch a quilt on Friday; never make one lacking a flaw; put in a nussing block, a stuttered braid or attach an extra row. Since only God was perfect, Emily deliberately misplaced shapes or patches of color to display her faith. Doing what she could to create a system, she numbered her quilts like a sequence of poems.

141                  Evening Star was piled on the top. Used to wrap the dead, if it was a last wish, Emily did not express it to Lavinia. Backed in cast off linen, pieces of her mother's wedding gown were framed in black velvet from the dress Emily wore to mourn father, mother and her brother Austin's child. Scrapping fifty years of Dickinson life, Emily stitched from heart to mind Tenderly fucking them in from frost Before their feet are cold.

214                     No member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Debauchee of Dew stitched a spiky track shaded in black called Drunkard's Path not for other husbands she watched as they staggered out but to celebrate self and drinking rum: Domingo, Jamaica, the little Tippler From Manzanilla come.

249                  Wrapped in Mariner's Compass with a complex star of many diamonds she worked around pineapples, Emily shipped out with sailors bound for the South Seas: Futile—the Winds—To a Heart in port—Done with the Compass ­Done with the Chart!

398                  At first glance, Lavinia might have seen stars in her older sister's Spider‑web quilt. Emily varied pieces in webs to get different effects. A limit like the Yeil Unto the lady's face—But every Mesh—a Citadel—And Dragons‑in the Crease—

945                  Blossom of the Brain—A small—italic See Lodged by Design or Happening was stitched in Grandmother's Flower Garden, hexagons of blue, yellow, pink and green Emily leaned over on the fence to watch her sister‑in‑law, Sue, tend every spring.

956                  To have something to help her face tomorrow's question, I—do not fly, so wherefore My Perennial things? Emily left the tricky Feather Star and Indian Braids in sequence, unfinished.

986                  The evil Emily knew, she met more than once on walks and quilted it into the Snake: But never met this Fellow Attended, or alone Without a tighter breathing And Zero at the Bone—

1142                Creating her own home, she stitched Log Cabin with red wool at the center of each square, her metaphor for fire to consume strips of a dress she cut tip for logs. Crooked and pitched, the pieces were rectangles used as props until The House support itself And cease to recollect The Augur and the Carpenter

1247                To calculate a change in season, To pile like thunder to it's close Then crumble grand away, Emily set green and white triangles into eight squares combined with a green and white square to make four corner blocks. White triangles quilted formed Weathervane of 21 blocks alternating with 21 planes.

1483                As covert as a Fugitive, Cajoling Consternation By Ditties to the Enemy And sylvan Punctuation—Not in her words but in the deeds she stitched, Emily was no 31 stranger to the Civil War. She hung Jacob's Ladder on her mother's clothesline to give the runaway slaves who could not read a code that the Dickinson house was a safe one on the underground railroad

1732                Not to cover any woman, Friendship Quilt was for Charles Wadsworth when he left for San Francisco. To let her fingers show her love, her skill, Emily embroidered in all the stitches she knew: herringbone, arrowhead, feathered chain, chevron. She didn't thread a tract of names Charles was leaving behind but Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.

Quilting small pieces of Amherst life, death, immortality, love or renunciation, ecstasy or suffering, doing what she could to stop age and time, Emily did not display her quilts. Exposure to sunlight, while it enriched life, faded the color, rotted the fabric. Storing her quilts kept them intact longer but like poems left unpublished, no one enjoyed the beauty she created while she was alive. Emily, her mother, Lavinia and Sue had no railway check and conductor to give the guarantee that their train was proceeding to the right destination. What Lavinia found in her sister's room were poems, 1775 packets of them folded in chests, perched on chairs, stacked at the foot of her bed, words to be preserved, canonized like relics from a saint. If with patchwork pitched over her knees like a tent or stretched on a frame, Emily had stitched This is my letter to the world That never wrote to Me on cloth and never inked a poem, her life would have been folded away in chests like countless days of other women and left, nameless, to rot.