Emily Austenson Brontëbot
She was everything I’d ever dreamed of in a writing professor:
Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontë sisters
rolled into one. Thanks to the genius
of reconstructed engrams—take that, biographical fallacy!
Thank you much, psychoanalysis of literary figures!—
Emily Austenson Brontë sat on my desk,
her crooked, satirical smile
knowing so much more than I ever would,
one raised eyebrow seeming to tear my work to shreds.
But I’d asked for this, hadn’t I? When the school
required each student to fill out a profile
of their favorite works of the imagination
and the traits of the ideal teacher,
they weren’t kidding around. The mini
Emily Austenson Brontëbot still looked ever so wise
and superior at her perfect desktop height,
her eyes level with mine as I sat in front of my favorite window,
while she dissected my latest creative attempt
to join literature’s Great Conversation,
my dialogue with all beloved works that had gone before.
“You have wit,” she conceded.
“Yes?” I asked nervously
“Tell me, was that your childhood, or your childhood as you understood it
with the help of Charlotte Brontë?”
I flushed, and tried to hide my face
behind the heavy velvet curtains that shielded my window nook.
Jane Eyre’s window. On my lap rested a writing desk
modeled after Austen’s. What could I say? They were my heroes,
mothers of the mind. “Isn’t that the point?” I said.
She looked startled. “Go on. And tell it slant.”
I shared my truth. “Each work we imbibe leaves its imprint.
Shifts the furniture around in our brains.
Their shape becomes part of ours. Transmission complete.”
She nodded sagely. “Now find your mind in all of this.”
She swirled my papers, then tossed a handful
toward the mud-swirled ceiling. Released from her fingers,
each page turned itself into a unique shape: snowflake,
bird-plane, sunflower. A snake slithered across the flowers
of my carpet, then curled under the arch
of my blue-stockinged foot: formed of my curled-up page of poetry,
it shivered nervously. With one clever paw I caught a flying fish
from the air, consuming its airy papercraft
with one quick guzzle: my words layered on her imagery
like sketch over sketch, like an album and a novel inspiring one another,
both based upon the shared death of one father—the Danielewski siblings,
whose Poe-like House of Leaves so Haunted me. Hello!
Like Fionn mac Cumhaill of my grandpa’s Irish fame,
I tapped one tooth, my grin as sharp and silver-flashing
as Emily’s biting pen or the fins of Fionn’s fish of knowledge,
a Salmon Beyond Doubt that might have provided Douglas Adams’s
Deep Thought with a different answer than “42.”
I toasted, “May your Conversation last a thousand-thousand years,
dear Emily Austenson Brontëbot.”
“I’ll give Will a run for his money,” she promised.
“Just be sure you do the same.” Her crooked grin
held all meaning, all mystery.
“I will if you will,” I swore. I spread my fingers
to release all the jazzy, bold letters
from my poetry shelves, their pages fluttering with love,
beating against one another or arching up to join in bridges and hearts,
fantastic forms still flying up to find new meanings.
Her robotic eyes sparkled with self-conscious life.
“We all keep each other going.”
“It’s not only nature who needs that mirror,” I agreed.