The Flame Tree

Torn

by Mary Oliver

I tore the web
   of a black and yellow spider

        in the brash of weeds

and down she came
    on her surplus of legs

      each of which

touched me and really
    the touch wasn't much

                   but then the way

if a spider can
    she looked at me

            clearly somewhere between

outraged and heartbroken
    made me say "I'm sorry

         to have wrecked your home

your nest your larder"
     to which she said nothing

                  only for an instant

pouched on my wrist
then swung herself off

                     on the thinnest of strings

back into the world.
This pretty, this perilous world. 

                     *

Dear Meghan---back into the world--- Love Emilie.

"Joy has been leaking out of our life. We have let the new Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life."

Barbara Holland (1933-2010).

Image: Craigie Aitchison, The Tree (1968)

Upheaval, a Gift from the Sea

"I have not simply made the piece to be destroyed by the sea. The work has been given to the sea as a gift. And the sea has taken the work and made more of it than I could ever have hoped for. 

And I think that if I could see in that way, as an understanding... those things that happen to us in life that change our lives, that cause upheavals and shock.... [trails off, pauses, sighs] ... I cant explain that..."

Andy Goldsworthy, from the film Rivers & Tides (2000), discussing his art pictured above.

Celestial Music

by Louise Gluck

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks
    to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
 Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling
    over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to
    oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across
    the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else
    explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries
    her head in the pillow
so as to not see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness---
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person---
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial
    music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height---
then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth---

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar
    doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something
    beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the
    composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering---
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings

(Above, "4am flowers," thanks Gib)

Another Thought

Praying
by Mary Oliver

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

Thoughts on Worship

Lately---I can't remember what triggered it---but lately, I've been thinking about worship. There is something about the word 'worship'---along with words such as devotion, prayer, repose---that I adore. They are beautiful words that haven't yet been worn thin by overuse.

Up until recently, I thought of worship as an act---a supplication, a bowing down to. I also thought of it as something that I didn't do. I'm not very a passionate or supplicant type----I do not throw myself down before altars or make pilgrimages or set up shrines. To worship, I thought, one had to sort of clear away a big, scared space: temporal space such as time away from obligation and distraction. Or literal space such as an ancient cathedral or a snowfield at dusk; a silent shoreline; a mountain, magnificent in the still afternoon heat of an African savanna. 

But here is something: worship, I am realizing, is not always so sweeping and intense. It is sometimes but not always. Worship can be little: a gesture---a gesture and another and another that becomes a series and then a lifetime of gestures. What you worship is simply (but not always) what you think about a lot, what you dwell on. I'm not sure, I might be making this up. But anyway, this is what is interesting to me. 

Here is David Foster Wallace's thoughts on the subject, from a commencement address he made to Kenyon College in May 2005 (two years before he would, sadly, commit suicide):

There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect---being seen as smart---you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

"Worship," one minister recently shared with me, "means creating a space for God." Insert your God there: "JC or Allah or YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess"; or your money, your lover, your ambitions or desire for power. It is a rather simple exercise, actually.

Worship means creating a space for God. I like that.

The photo "Checking the ice on Flagstaff Lake" is another by Lizzie McGhee, who definitely worships the good things.

One for the writers

Jeanette Winterson, discussing her book Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules:

I have written this personal story in the First Person, indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this leads to questions of autobiography.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call ‘real’, whether it’s Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and ‘true life’ accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.

Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.

(For more about Jeanette Winterson and her work click here: jeanette winterson)

Ode to Updike

I am so sad to learn of the death of John Updike today. I knew this day would come, and I've been dreading it. And now it's here, and the feeling is worse than I had anticipated.

I grew up in a small New England town next to Mr. Updike's small New England town. Much of what he wrote personally resonated with me----the essay about the commuter train to Boston, the girl in the AP story who everyone claimed was their sister. His characters were often so familiar----his scenes so famliar----that I turned to his books during lonely times in Africa. When I finished my thesis for Columbia, my gift to myself was his book, In the Beauty of the Lilies. That was the sweetest gift I've given to myself, come to think of it. I loved him so much that I even forgave him that weird habit he had of describing the slightly sagging flesh of women's upper arms and knees...

The moments I actually saw him were magnificent. At the country club dining room one Saturday--he must have been playing golf. This was ten years ago. I remember his ears mostly, they were sort of glowing red in the afternoon summer WASP-y light.

And Christmas several years ago, after the Christmas Eve church service. His wife was in charge of something or other, and had brought a basket of individually wrapped cookies to hand out to the congregration as we left. It's a tiny church in our neighborhood, Mr. Updike didn't attend often. His wife---one of those compact, efficient wives he so often rendered in words----had hooked the basket of cookies over his bent elbow and (I imagine) instructed him to stand there. He did it with a combination of humilidity and amusement, standing outside the door in the icey New England cold, holding his Easter basket of Christmas cookies. He was rather shy standing there---too shy to push the cookies on people, so you had to be brave to go up and take one. Then he smiled nicely, and even apologetically, as if to suggest he wasn't really the best man for the job, but he was trying his best.

(The image is of John Updike. See http://www.illoz.com/arichardallen/)

Mornings at Blackwater

by Mary Oliver

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

(everyone buy Mary Oliver's amazing new book, Red Bird.)

Tuesday morning thought on creative infinity

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.
            Marguerite Duras, Writing

Recuerdo

Here is my favorite love poem of all time. Edna St. Vincent Millay was my grandmother's favorite poet. She told me this almost secretly, as an aside. A little something I needed to know before she died. I think it was her way of suggesting that she too ran a bit free in the 1920s in New York City. Oh how I love this poem! Read it aloud, if you can close your office door or are brave enough to be a bit dorky. Do you remember how Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing Dorothy Parker in the film Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, read Parker's poems? With a sort of rough, measured, druggy, smirky voice. Read it like that it's so fun.

Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry---
We went back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable---
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry---
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucket full of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Map of Another Town

The following is the introduction (untitled) by M.F.K. Fisher to her book Map of Another Town, originally published in 1964.

Often in the sketch for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town.
    Not everything can be told, nor need it be, just as the artist himself need not and indeed cannot reveal every outline of his vision.
    There before us is what one human being has seem of something many others have viewed differently, and the lines held back are perhaps the ones most vital to the whole.
    Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.
    Over the years I have taught myself, and have been taught, to be a stranger. A stranger usually has the normal five senses, perhaps especially so, ready to protect him and nourish him.
    Then there are the extra senses that function only in subconsciousness. These are perhaps a stranger's best allies, the ones that stay on and grow stronger as time passes and immediacy dwindles.
    It is with the invisible ink distilled from all these senses, then, that I have drawn this map of a town, a place real in stone and water, and in the spirit, which may also be realer.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
in which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet of the women about you?

VII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
in the cedar-limbs.

       *

As a Massachusettsian, I'm struck by how this poem makes Connecticut---a state I know as a landscape of routes that lead to New York City---seem so exotic. But that's an aside.

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (a literary nod to the Cubist movement) is full of whim and beauty and seriousness and symbolism.  I learned all this yesterday on Wikipedia and now I will share it with you.

The poem suggests (as the famous Helen Vendler notes) "an infinite number of ways of looking at and symbolizing any piece of reality." (One year in college, my house mate---a very disciplined artist---had an art assignment that has stayed with me all these years, and I think relates to this concept of looking at a piece of reality. She had to chose an object and render it artistically, using any medium, each day, every day, for the entire semester. She chose an old cowboy hat. Some days she did a quick sketch, other days an oil painting, or a photo, or an abstract, or a pen and ink of a detail, etc. What a great project that would be, I always thought. Though I remember that by December, she wanted to throw-up on the hat and never see it again.)

The blackbird is often noted as a symbol of death in the poem, and re-reading the poem with that in mind does enlighten the text considerably.

Haddam (stanza VII) sounds Biblical or Islamic, and it made me feel dumb right away, like references I should know were flying over my head and all over the place. But, actually, it's a town in Connecticut. There's an old saying 'to have been to Haddam' that means 'to have had syphilis'. For more elaboration on this, click here.

Meanwhile, for a very prestigious and solemn and sometimes smoky, champagne-y writing group, I have been assigned to write something---anything---on the word 'displacement'. It's due, conveniently, in 13 days. I'm feeling very cowboy hat/blackbird about it.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's introduction.

An unusual reunion

Are you there? I vanished! Beautiful vacation (beaches, swimming pools) marked by bits of calamity (the girl broke her arm)----it's all happening so fast. Not time to write, no time to write...

I'm sure the poetry police will come after me and pull me from my house for this. But here is the story: Lucy Brock Broido, for a workshop I attended at Columbia almost a decade ago, compiled a notebook of poems which is worth more than its weight in gold. I came to my parent's home this August with the intention to find my copy. I know I have it somewhere... through boxes and into attics I have foraged this month with, alas, no success.

But I did find one of the poems from the notebook, printed out and inserted in some random art book. The poet's name, I gather, is Thomas James. I remember the story---his one book of published poetry out of print, he died in the 70s, largely forgotten. Here is one of his poems. It might be hard for the squeamish to get through certain moments of it  (and on a beautiful August day by the sea, it's simply wrong...), but the end makes it worth it. And if I don't copy it in now, I'm sure I'll lose it for another decade.

Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh
XXI Dynasty

My body holds its shape. The genius is intact.
Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country
The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone.
Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms,
And passionflowers lit my father's garden.
Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow,
The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness?

I remember how I died. It was so simple!
One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out.
On my left side they made the first incision.
They washed my heart and liver in palm wine---
My lungs were two dark fruit they stuffed with spices.
They smeared my innards with a sticky unguent
And sealed them in a crock of alabaster.

My brain was next. A pointed instrument
Hooked it through my nostrils, strand by strand.
A voice swayed over me. I paid no notice.
For weeks my body swam in sweet perfume.
I came out scoured. I was skin and bone.
They lifted me into the sun again
And packed my empty skull with cinnamon.

They slit my toes; a razor gashed my fingertips.
Stitched shut at last, my limbs were chaste and valuable,
Stuffed with a paste of cloves and wild honey.
My eyes were empty, so they filled them up,
inserting little nuggets of obsidian.
A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts
Replaced the tinny music of my heart.

Hands touched my sutures. I was so important!
They oiled my pores, rubbing a fragrance in.
An amber gum oozed down to soothe my temples.
I wanted to sit up. My skin was luminous,
Frail as the shadow of an emerald.
Before I learned to love myself too much,
My body wound itself in spools of linen.

Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object.
I wear a wooden mask. There are my eyelids,
Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth,
Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets.
I will last forever. I am not impatient---
My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.
I'll lie here till the world swims back again.

When I come home the garden will be budding,
While petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers,
The far-off music of a tambourine.
A boy will pace among the passionflowers,
His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces.
I'll know the mouth of my young groom, I"ll touch
His hands. Why do people lie to one another?

The Cobweb

by Raymond Carver

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that's happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea was
dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I'll be gone from here.

from an excellent anthology of poetry A Book of Luminous Things

Spring Snow

By Arthur Sze

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

The image is "Plum Tree against a Colorful Temple Wall" by Raymond Gehman. Click here for more information.

The Longing to be Pure

                        

...motion that forces change---
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed...
(from PRAYER by Jorie Graham)

It's not fair, to the poet or the poem, to quote a few mangled lines like this, but these are the words that have haunted me lately, recurring through my thoughts like an incantation. I don't know why. I am not a freaky mystic. I am not a mad woman visited by Greek verse as I go about my errands. But I can't get these words out of my head. Maybe it was the weekend above Naivasha, the inevitable demise of that region---the longing for purity. Maybe it's the season, the talk of departure, the sense of time passing as the school year ends and families pack up, some for the summer, others for good---the motion that forces change. Regardless, I must have recited these lines 100 times over the last few days. They seem to apply to everything, and then, just as easily, to nothing.

This morning, the girl's ballet recital (three year olds lifting their arms, trotting in circles). Does this explain the lines? I wondered. Is it the purity of these little girls in pink that the poet refers to? Is it our longing she speaks of---the audience of parents, each tarnished by experience, tarnished by ambition and desire, and bristling with video cameras to preserve (on film) the innocence of being three?

The girls came out on stage.  They were not afraid. They harbor none of life's regrets. When the teacher began, they moved with her in a sort of group, but each was hardly aware of the other. Each was too involved her own stepping, in her toe pointing, in her sitting down and pretending to sleep. There was nothing superficial in their gestures, nothing contrived. When one girl slipped and fell, the others didn't flinch or even notice. But the audience gasped and sighed in sympathy. I think that's what made the girl cry. The teacher hugged her and handed her to her mother, while each adult fought back his or her own memories of disappointment, and the aloneness that those memories evoke. What we long for is to be pure...

And then, as I watched the little dancers, another passage came to me---perhaps, finally, a response to Graham's lines. This by Mikhail Baryshnikov. I read it in the New York Times years ago, a passage from an introduction he wrote for a book:

It [the beauty of ballet] seemed very personal, because it was contained in the bodies of the dancers, and the body is so revealing. When a dancer comes on stage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. He has already met a million forks in the road. Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be. All the experiences he had as a child and as a teen-ager, all the images that his body has accumulated, these come up as colors in the dancing, giving it sparkle and complexity. They come out through the eyes, through the pores.

Well... we are all, if you will, dancers on a stage. We are each the person we cannot help but be---an accumulation of our experience, of the images we absorb, of "the blessings and disasters that are the center of our lives" (Baryshnikov). Can we preserve this morning's three year old? She is already a memory. The longing is to be pure... but  what we get is to be changed.

But, to be honest, the ballet recital was pretty boring. Once my daughter left the stage, I lost interest. It lacked... sparkle. It lacked complexity. It was like going to a museum, and seeing nothing but blank slates.

 

(Click on blue, underlined words to link to poems, articles, books, etc. The image is "Blue Dancers" by Edgar Degas. And it just made the slightest change in you.)

Cold in winter, hot in summer

Another quote---unusually long, not a poem. This is from The Irrational Season, by Madeleine L'Engle (who wrote A Wrinkle in Time). It was published in 1977, but seemed to meet me at the door and speak to me today. This passage touches on so many subjects---babies, letting go, weight, affluence, fear, pollution and heat and cold, I found it remarkable.

I looked at my last baby lying in his cradle, knowing that he was the last child I would bear, for I nearly didn't survive his birth; looked, touched, listened, with an incredible awareness I might not have had if I had been able to expect to bear more children. As each change came, I had to let the infant-that-was go, go forever. When he was seven months old I weaned him, as part of that essential letting go, letting him move on to child, little boy, young man.... Love, and let go. Love, and let go.
    It's always pain, this letting go, and yet it leads to joy, and a kind of lightness which is almost physical.
    We tend to be heavy, we middle Americans, heavy in all ways. More than half the world is starving, and we go on crash diets to try to take off weight. Nor are we jolly fat people. Affluence tends to bring with it a stupor, a flatulence of spirit. It is difficult to laugh freely as long as we are clutching all that we have accumulated and are afraid to lose.
     One day in early spring Pat and I drove up to Crosswicks. There was snow on the ground; I made Pat put on boots and a heavy coat and trek with me across the fields to the brook. I strayed from the path several times, fell, laughing into snowdrifts, from which she had to pull me, but at least we reached the brook, which was rushing noisily, at its fullest from melting snow. And Pat looked at it and then said in a bemused voice, "It's not polluted!"
    Pat is a physician who is Chief of Health for a large Southern city. Part of her job is understanding problems of pollution, overconsumption... Standing there on the rock bridge over the brook I asked her, "Are we going to be able to save planet earth?"
    She replied calmly. "No. Not unless we're willing to make drastic changes in our standard of living. Not unless we're willing to go back to being as cold in winter a our grandparents were, and as hot in summer."
                    The Irrational Season, (HarperCollins, 1977) pgs 115-116

The chill, the stupor, the letting go

Many years ago, I memorized this Emily Dickinson poem for a class. Since then, in times of pain, I have often found solace in it. I know it's hard among the emails, text messages, reports and billboards to make space to really read a poem, especially those poems of yore. You have to let the mind's buzzing and the humming settle down first, you have to create a space. But if you persevere with this one, it very well may yield peace when you need it.

The beauty of a poem like this one is that it moves and adjusts to many interpretations. I tend to think (and this is a very unofficial, un-academic interpretation) that he 'He' refers to God. That the 'Feet, mechanical, go round' is the way we march through life, partially in a daze to conceal our hearts from pain. The 'wooden way'---though obviously the marching onward in the numbness of suffering---also refers to the path that led from Emily's house to her sister's, a link which had its complexities. Quartz is literally a colorless, transparent mass of mineral. I think of it here as representing the heart. The 'Hour of Lead' describes how time seems to suspend and weigh heavy in times of pain.

This is for TEB & MR, and everyone.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (341)
Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone ---

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snow --
First -- Chill -- then stupor -- then the letting go --

cultivate your contentment

"You must have seen this over and again in your life: it's when you are free of selfishness that the harvest of contentment appears. It's when you are not thinking of yourself in a selfish way that you experience the tender shoots of contentment growing inside your heart."

                                                         Swami Chidvilasananda
                                                          The Yoga of Discipline