What is the right thing to do? The certainty is not there. What lies beyond the narrow path, the nibble, the sip, where the dragons be? Just because she doesn’t yet know doesn’t mean she should close down and settle for the joyless default. The earth doesn’t need one more resentful, depressed sort. Having studied and taught stories and poems all her own life, it’s now in her DNA, to want to give that life a shapely form, fill in the blank in the dangling line: And Finished knowing—then—
Emily Dickinson. I felt a funeral, in my brain
