Amherst, MA, April 1, 2010 – While digging up an 18th century field to make way for a 21st century parking lot, workers unearthed a 19th century box containing a never-before-seen poem by Amherst’s own Emily Dickinson.
About the size of a blue Mini Cooper, the hand-hewn, faux marble plywood box, strangely reminiscent of Project 122 from The Christopher Lowell Show, has the words “Nova Scotia salmon” carved in the bottom. The box, much like one of a set Dickinson was known to play with whenever she received the gas bill, also contained a golf scorecard from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary’s twentieth reunion of the class of 1847,1 a booklet titled Partial Rhyming to Bug the Hell Out of Everyone by D. Baker Player, and a mayoral dispensation allowing Dickinson to wear white after Labor Day.
The verse is scrawled on twenty-pound, 8½ x 11 yellowed white paper with a
brightness factor of 2 (estimated originally to have been 108) and bears the inscription “If found, drop in any mailbox.” Dr. Rowland Emerson Loone, noted Dickinson scholar, Elvis sighting verifier, and part time carbon dater, inspected the poem while in New York testing the authenticity of one of the Rockettes:
“An unpublished Dickinson! It’s more exciting than the time Uncle Roger served Waldorf Salad at the Barclay! Look at that thrilling not quite iambic trimeter! Gaze at those uncrossed t’s, those undotted i’s, those upside down o’s! I’m absolutely almost pretty sure it’s hers.”
Garth Groiner, the forklift operator who unearthed the box, speaking on condition of anonymity, exclaimed, “My beard’s on fire!” then quickly added, “It’s the biggest find since Old Man Tweener dug up that anvil under the spreading chestnut tree behind Smithy’s Village Inn.”
1775 ½
I met a golden cockroach
Upon my garden walk.
Because he was a-mating,
He could not stop to talk.2
That mouth was still and voiceless.
His shell did glow of morn.
The eyes like round hibiscus,
His feet had not a corn.
“Where might Juno3 tread?” I mused,
“This fellow hath not stepped first?”
Then queried I, “Who cares?”
For this is but droll verse.
But I’d know him if I saw him,
Should ere we meet anon.
He had a look about him;
It spoke of naughty fun.4
I’d stroke the shielded lover, and
Feeling my spirits grow,
Pick him up quite gingerly
And feed him to a crow.5
1 Dickinson won the match in spite of triple-bogeying number seven, having lost the ball in her skirt.
2 Dickinson biographer Rolf Frenzer alleges Dickinson sometimes spoke with neighborhood flies about fluctuating currency rates.
3 Dickinson’s paper boy’s Great Dane.
4 Originally written “fon” then crossed out.
5 This is one of the same crows that inspects crumbs in Dickinson’s “Fame Is a Fickle Food.”
