78 PA RT O N E
a book near the other. Later she writes to young cousins about discovering a
witch hazel shrub: “I had never seen it but once before, and it haunted me like
childhood ’s Indian pipe, or ecstatic puff-balls, or that mysterious apple that
sometimes comes on river-pinks.” Puffballs, a mushroom-like fungus, burst
at the touch and discharge brown powder. But “ecstatic”? That sprouted from
her own nature. “I have long been a Lunatic on bulbs.” One day in her conser-
vatory she showed someone a chrysalis that “had burst its bonds, and floating
about in the sunshine was a gorgeous butterfly,” says the neighbor. “I did not
understand all she said about it, but it was beautiful to see her delight and to
hear her talk.”
At ease in the natural world, Dickinson was less forward than Whitman. A
photo shows the Bard on whose upraised fingers a butterfly has alighted; after
his death a pasteboard butterfly was found among his things. He spoke readily
for “beetles rolling balls of dung” and “threads that connect the stars,” but she
was not so sure.
Touch lightly Nature ’s sweet Guitar
Unless thou know’st the Tune
Or every Bird will point at thee
Because a Bard too soon—Like slant-rhyming “Bard” with “Bird,” her touch for nature was light, what-
ever the overtones.
Dickinson’s glancing touch graces a riddle she sent to friends from 1879 on,
known by an opening line as ungraspable as the creature itself:
A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald—
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride—For “revolving” she ’d tried alternatives: “delusive,” “dissembling,” “dissolv-
ing.” The simplest word catches wingbeats so rapid they blur like wheel spokes
in a four-line whir of r’s. Evanescence has left us floating amid motion, color,
sound: a precious bright green humming, a scarlet or ruby-throated rush. Then
with no notice the hummingbird—if that ’s what it was—is gone.
What ’s left is every blossom astir, adjusting itself in the wake of a quick visit.
Then a witness fancies how fast this happened. Whereas (in Shakespeare ’s Tem-
pest) Tunis lies so far from Naples that no letter can arrive “unless the sun were