The Dashes They Corrected (Emily Dickinson)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You wrote eighteen hundred poems
in a house in Massachusetts
and left the house
a hundred and ten yards
in your last thirty years —
the garden, the conservatory,
the carriage house,
the mailbox at the edge of the property —
and the default mode network
that handles internal monologue
in the absence of stimulation
was receiving stimulation
from a room
the way other brains
receive it from a continent

[Verse 2]
You folded the poems
into small packets —
five or six sheets,
stitched with thread,
called fascicles
by the scholars who found them later —
and the fascicles smelled
like old rag fiber
and the particular dust
of a drawer nobody had opened
for twenty years
before your sister finally did
and the opening
was the only editor
the poems had ever authorized

[Chorus]
The dashes were not hesitations
they were punctuation —
the prefrontal cortex
that compressed a thought
into eight syllables
needed a mark for the pause
that the comma could not hold
and the semicolon could not hold
and the period foreclosed —
and you invented the mark
and the editors replaced every one of them
with commas and periods
for seventy years
because they thought
you had simply not known
the convention
and the convention they protected
was the convention you were arguing with

[Outro]
Ten poems were published while you were alive
and seventeen hundred ninety were not
and the hippocampus
that had stored thirty years of one garden
did the compression
your sister would later open a drawer to find —
and the drawer held a life
small enough to be carried from a room
and large enough
to change the shape
of the English-language poem
for the next hundred and fifty years
which is more than the door
ever carried out of the house