Emily Dickinson's Lightning Poem by Doren Robbins

You're at peace again.
You smell her musk
and sweat
on your skin again.
You know what Bach means
in his composition
'the Joy Of Man's Desiring, ”
if you didn't you
would check out,
you wouldn’t bother
again to estimate
the weight of a moth
forcing down
a Bird of Paradise
petal, that’s for sure.

The bottom of the sea
is cruel, wrote Hart Crane.
And by that he meant
there is a complexity
of human personality
in which the value
of human personality
is reduced
to a form
of ruined or unreal
idealizations.
And down you go.

Yet, the lightning
is a yellow fork
from tables
in the sky,
believed Emily Dickinson.
You never considered
this poem before,
and you only
think of it now,
because you see
how closely
we can compare
our everyday lives
to nature, since
it took only
a fork
falling off a table
to call it lightning.