-my visit to “PennSound”-

"the soul selects her own society"

my visit to “PennSound”

finds a large collection of audio poetry, offering poets

reading from their own works as well as offerings

of poets now dead or somehow incapacitated.

I scrolled through the names in search of "Emily Dickinson"
fantasizing along the way, that maybe a previously unknown,
scratchy, metallic machine of sorts had been unearthed
on the garden grounds where the fig tree stands at Amherst,

presenting an early experimental waxed recording of Emily

reading her poems, scrap after scrap unbound ––

the delicate contralto barely audible beyond the surface hiss,

the graciousness in her diction, the implement close to her mouth,

her living breath carrying with it the warmth of her isolation,

the understandable quaver while reading into the inconceivable contraption.

but because I can't have all that I long for, I settled into the voice of

Naomi Replansky, born in the Bronx, sounds like the Bronx even now,

righteously reading: "The Soul Selects Her Own Society" in place of the voice

of Emily Dickinson.