(In memory of Emily Carr of Victoria, BC,
and Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Mass.)

Emily’s Elephant does not seem big enough
to resemble an actual elephant,
but that’s what Miss Carr called
the small rectangular wooden structure
that the artist used as a traveling studio.

How on earth did she fit her ample self
through its narrow door? Where did she
put canvases and brushes as she trundled
her Elephant to paint on location
in her caravan, often with a dog or two
and a monkey in tow?

“Her square ugliness bathed in
the summer sunshine,” she wrote of
the Elephant, which sits outside her
childhood home, “and I sang in my heart. “

How struck I am by this smaller yellow
Victorian reminiscent of larger yellow
Victorian occupied by a different Emily
a continent away in the country
I call home.

I climb the stairs to veer into the north
bedroom and peer out the window,
thinking about the Emily born in Victoria,
much as I did in Dickinson’s Amherst
bedroom, located in the same corner
in her house.

The two Emilys did not know
each other—the poet of Amherst
born 41 years before the Canadian writer
also regarded as one of her country’s
great painters.

But I find myself looking west into
this Victorian afternoon, thinking
about them both, having stood in each
of the home spaces that nurtured
the gifts of these two creative souls
who linger long, as does their light,
shining clear into the now.