I. Signs & Wonders

Among Dickinson's Late Papers is a manuscript--one text, several texts?--especially marked by the signs of flight. The manuscript, here identified by its catalog number A 821, constitutes a kind of exit-text. It may have been composed in a few minutes, or even seconds, in the early spring of 1885, since one line of the text re-appears, slightly altered, in three fair-copy drafts of a letter composed by Dickinson to Helen Hunt Jackson in March of that year, but apparently never completed or mailed. In Thomas H. Johnson's The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), it is annexed to these drafts as a footnote. Its provenance, as well as the date of its composition, however, remain unconfirmed. I found it first by accident, in the Amherst College Library, when it fell (rose?) out of an acid-free envelope, out of the space of claustration. If I had not held it lightly in my hands, I would never have suspected the manner in which it was assembled. Although its brevity and immediacy place it outside the reach of conventional classifactory gestures, it bears a striking affinity to the genre David Porter names "small, rickety infinitudes.">1 Look at it now, flying on the screen/page, vying with light:

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