EMILY'S BIRTHDAY GIFT

It is not without tension
that I'm in Amherst
for a change
disposing of a blue gentian
resembling lapis lazuli
on Emily Dickinson
along mums near her grave
here on her birthday
December the tenth
with a Serb exchange student
having seen her herbarium
by Harvard at length
there among her hardy
favorite garden flowers
jasmine,roses, cyclamen
that she nursed,
I'm returning every year
to these grassy tall dunes
at this relapsed hour
on this Autumnal sight
perhaps seeking pardon
as a learning lyrical bard
with remembered wounds
for a poet's fearful faults
in the morning burst
of a salt first light.