"Bruce Holland Rogers - A Common Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

A Common Night
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1995 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


"So it's another one of her sunset poems," the young woman said, managing to make it sound partly
like a question and partly like a bold assertion so that Julian could decide for himself which it was. She
gave him a neutral look.
He looked past her, out the second story window to the bare tree outside. Snowflakes were falling.
"Next to 'Leaping like Leopards,' this one seems obvious," said another student, the one with
short-cropped black hair. Randal. Or was it Roger? Five weeks into the semester, Julian would
ordinarily have had their names down by now.
"I mean, the spots are a clue," Randal or Roger continued. " 'She died at play, Gambolled away Her
lease of spotted hours...' When I get to those spots, it reminds me of the one we did last week." He
flipped pages and read,
Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

Leaping like Leopards to the Sky

Then at the feet of the old Horizon

Laying her spotted Face to die

"That's one thing I like about reading her," Randal said. "Once you've figured out a few of the poems,
you sort of have an idea of what she's up to. It's almost fun."
Two or three in the seminar circle laughed at his "almost".
"I just don't see why she has to work death into every other poem," the young woman continued.
"She's so morbid."
No one said anything. For an unnaturally long time, the students waited for Julian to stick up for Emily
Dickinson.
"Well," he said, but then the next word was very difficult to find. He kept staring at the window, at the
falling snow. "Well," he said again.
He had stopped sleeping several nights ago-- two or three. He wasn't sure. For weeks, he'd slept
fitfully amidst the daily rounds of Home-Hospice-Campus-Hospice-Dinner-Hospice with the kids. Lately
he would lie awake all night, listening to the dark, closing his eyes, but never drifting off.
He blinked and looked away from the window. "Death was rather more present in the nineteenth
century," he said. "More ordinary, I mean. We tend to hide it away, but death and thoughts of death
were more routine."
"But why dwell on it?" the young woman asked.
He looked at the book in his hands. It was full of words, and it was his job now to summon up some
more of them, to use Dickinson to explain Dickinson. He could do it. Even after days without sleep, he
could do it, but he noticed what a hollow exercise it had become. Whatever he might say next would
sound good and satisfying, but it was just a stream of words.
"Let's look at 675 again," he said, and before they had finished turning their pages he recited the first
stanza from memory.