You are Gold

     I am Ambushed

Is this the ending,

Or a beginning in reverse?

In this trap of black and white

I see the Darkness - You see the Light.

I have no prayers for you

I am locked inside.

Keep the silence - I can hear,

tenderness is quick to bear

You are Gold

     I am Ambushed.

Meta-Commentary:

In keeping with Dickinson's practice, I have left my poem untitled.  If it must be titled, I leave it to one of my fellow students: "Early editors of her poems took the liberty of making <Emily's poetry> more accessible to nineteenth-century readers ... by assigning them titles" (American Transcendentalism Web). 

I chose to parody Emily Dickinson's 'Dying.'  Specifically, I wanted to continue on as though the subject of the poem finally snapped out of the matter-of-factness in which they had been viewing their death and saw the fly for what it was.  I took the direction that perhaps "the fly may stand for Beelzebub, who is also known as lord of the flies. Sometimes Beelzebub is used as another name for Satan" (Emily Dickinson).  If the fly were, in fact, satan, how would the newly departed feel?  If it were me, expecting either a white light to embrace me or darkness and worms to fill the rest of my days, I wanted to explore what those feelings would be.  In my version I personified Gold and used him as my metaphor for satan (the fly).  I did this for the very reason of what gold can represent - privilege, greed, possession, wealth - traits that are not considered heavenly expressions or behaviors.  At the same time I wanted to keep the irony that Dickinson is known for by allowing that while my subject can only see the darkness coming for her, Gold can only see the light. 

I also tried to keep in sync with Dickson's style in 'Dying,' by wanting it to appear as though it were just a quick moment in time.  "With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, / Between the light and me / And then the windows failed, and then / I could not see to see" uses "Dickinson's tendency to write lines in units of two" (Emily Dickinson).  While I prefer more free-verse poetry, I found this 'unit of two' to be a comfortable way to write and kept it consistent with the original poem.  

Fall of the Temple of Joy

It was Joy’s birthday wish that we should build a cenotaph in honor of my family.  Our new home – willed to me as the last heir to hold the J. Trader name – was made of grey stone.  The stone, once used by countrymen seeking protection from gargoyles resting upon the edges of turrets, surveying the great dark, marshes for evil and woe, was a small fortune.  It took great effort to secure the shipment, but Joy would not relent.  “It must be of the same stone,” she insisted, “protected by the thickest stone door I could find with a lock from which robbers would be deterred.” 

It was also Joy’s wish that each day she be allowed pride in watching me walk along the marsh to the hilltop where the mausoleum would sit.  Each day she would sit at her bedroom window and I would stop to wave as I made my way to our great monument.  I could always detect the faintest movement at the corners of Joy’s mouth and for a moment a gnawing fear would rise from the pit of my stomach.  It is only the cenotaph, I would reason, building a monument to the dead could raise the hair on anyone’s neck. 

It was the start of August when I completed the foundation of my dear Joy’s memorial.  I eyed the dwarfed walls for the two tombs, a last minute request from Joy.  “We don’t have a burial plot,” she had introduced late one August afternoon as the storm clouds moved in and a dreary rain began to freckle the dirt at our feet.  It was the last time she had ventured with me to participate in the erection of her mausoleum, not “wanting to spoil the ending,” she had said. 

On an early October afternoon, Joy parked the Escalade in the breezeway, freshly returned from an errand.  I watched her walk from her vehicle into the home, surly she must have seen me too?  I looked back to the exterior facades now complete with the requisite gargoyles, fauns, and satyrs carefully molded into the concrete facing of the mausoleum - truly stunning sight – and knew it would not be long before Joy beheld all the beauty I had grown to love?

The autumnal evening light takes on a special morose quality that lies somewhere between the callousness of summer and the desperate quiet of winter.  It was on this night such as this that I brought Joy down to see the mausoleum fulfilled.  “Beautiful,” she cried, as we held hands and gazed into our eternal beds.  “Did you bring the key?” she asked.  I had and I placed the large iron key in her hands.  Then she grabbed me with such will that I tripped forward into her kiss.  “It’s perfect,” she whispered.  Pulling away, she ran her hand along the wall, her fingers tracing the line between bricks as she made her way toward the door.  My mind was still transfixed by the beauty of her graceful fingers along the wall that I did not immediately see Joy grab hold of the door and move to swing it shut.  By the time my feet and brain jolted to reality, the key was being introduced to its mate.  My heart sank quicker than my feet and together we met each other at the floor. 

A fortnight passed since left to my doom.   In Joy’s absence, a plan – too mad to contemplate at first – began to absorb my thoughts.  Joy had never visited while I toiled with tools and stone.  If she had, she would have known of the tunnel placed under my tomb for such an unfortunate circumstance.  For these many days I had been stealing out of the mausoleum.  Each night, the house stood dark, ominous against the oncoming winter nights.

Joy did return on the 14^th day of madness.  As I removed myself from the hollowed passage I saw a candle flicker in her bedroom window.  As silent as a woodland creature I made my way into the house.  Nearing her sleeping form, I realized there were two under the comforter.  The turn of the key inside the lock popped in my ear and quickly I found my feet ushering me forward.  I pinched the cloth encased within my hand over Joy’s face.  There was no struggle and the frame beside her did not stir.  I leaned down and picked her lithe body up with ease.  The face of her companion turned toward me then and I saw with horror it was her twin, her constant companion before our marriage.  Oh the travesty!  The madness!  The mere thought infected me with terror. 

Quickly I carried Joy across the marsh.  I held the key (discovered hidden in the library within a copy of "Mad Trist" by Sir Launcelot Canning – too cute, my love) and placed it in the heavy stone door - the passage from which I had been escaping blocked now by the will of an undone man.  I placed my sleeping beauty inside her cradle and gently smoothed her features.  One final look around showed candles burning in every corner, large flames leaping to kiss the air – it was lucky I had left minute pockets of ventilation, never taking seriously the eternal preservation of bone and flesh. 

As my hand grasped the heavy stone door and began to push it closed, I looked to the wall opposite of me.  My smile stayed as I imagined the moment of my wife’s arousal and knew intimately the fear that would overwhelm her.  I looked down at my bloodied hands and again to the wall.  How would fear overtake her once her eyes fell upon the words smeared in her dead husband’s blood “The Fall of the Temple of Joy?”  The tumblers yielded to the key one last time.

Meta-Commentary:

It's not a surprise to me that my inspiration gravitated toward a parody of Poe.  Nor is it a surprise to me that I'll take a hit for not staying within the word count.  The unfortunate side of gothic writing is the atmosphere that needs to be created from which to tell the story, such as, "experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams, moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the rest" (The North Anthology of English Literature), is not an easy one to tell within a 500 word count.  That said, I enjoyed parodying 'Fall of the House of Usher' because it allowed me a chance to play with Gothic imagery as well as create my own parable.  I drew my initial inspiration from the moment where our speaker aids Usher in bringing his sister to "The vault in which we placed <the body> (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere,gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light" (Fall of the House of Usher).  Ultimately we discover the sister was not dead, only to die after escaping her chamber.  I started to consider the irony if the brother had planned to murder his sister; and what if she had been made to build her own death chamber?  But how brilliant would it be if she had been aware of her brother's plan the entire time and plotted her escape? Thus started the wheels turning.

Poe is never so blatant in the 'Fall of the House of Usher' as to let the speaker give an indication that he is aware of the true nature of madness occurring under his nose.  We see this most accessibly in examples like "The disease ... had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death" (Fall of the House of Usher).  Likewise I tried to keep my character completely ignorant of his doomed circumstances until the betrayal was upon him.  But I also tried to mimic Poe's sense of foreshadowing for the reader, as well as for the speaker.  The last thing I carried over directly from the 'Fall of the House of Usher' was the presumed incestuous relationship between the brother and the sister.  In my case, it is the reason for the wife to comment murder - but in Poe's case, it was the brother in his own madness dealing with the illness of his sister.  I tried to carry over the sense of falling into madness that the characters in 'Usher' achieve, but much of that had to be edited down and I fear very little is left. 

"Poe was essentially the product of his time" (The Atlantic Online: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe), as such his story contained old money with a full ancestry as background fodder, and tended toward what could happen if these two elements are abused (i.e., a family tree that goes straight up).  Old money and brother's and sisters having relations to "keep it in the family" is not very relateable these days, so I also wanted to update the story by turning it into a husband and wife who inherit money from a distant uncle.  It is the wife who "goes mad" when the money comes into her life, buying extravagant things and opting to murder her husband instead of having to share the wealth.