Emily Dickinson's I Dwell in Possibility

#657
Emily Dickinson


I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--


The most striking thing about this poem to me was the idea of Possibility, whatever that may mean, as a sturdy foundation, the makings of a dwelling. It seems like it wouldn't be a foundation but something opposite---because, how can you dwell in Possibility? If it was something you could live within, wouldn't that actualize it? And if it was actual, how could it be possible? I thought about the more common sense notion of possibility as a multiplicity, as the potential for many things rather than the realization of a thing. And I just ran with that. I thought about how possibility is a perception and how that perception can change---like sometimes the stuff of the past seems fixed and relegated to the set of things I have no influence over, yet sometimes I find myself thinking: if only I'd . . . . .  

Response: 


I perceive possibility-
locate it in various places,
in parts of the future,
past, and present:
it splits in forks ahead,
branches from behind,
and pervades the now
to have it be both
terribly important and
terribly breakable,
tenuous.

I watch it change with me