Without End

In yesterday’s post, the final in a series about short poems, I included a portion of an interview with poet Ocean Vuong.  He shared an anecdote of when he handed one of his poems to a teacher/mentor, and the prof’s response was – in the words of the interviewer – “a punch in the face.”  Here’s what Vuong said:
 
“I gave him a poem, he’s like ‘but I’ll show you – I want to do something – I’m going to show you.’ And he turns around, he’s typing into Google, and he says, ‘you see that line you wrote? It’s a decent line, but 300,000 people beat you to it.’”
 
The lesson from the prof – in Vuong’s words:  “We’re out here to write sentences the species has never encountered.”
 
Oddly enough, that statement made me think of one specific poem by Dickinson, one I’ve been playing around with as I set it to music for an annual ED birthday celebration concert that a friend of mine and I present each December (this year’s concert will be the “fourth annual”).  The poem:  “As imperceptibly as Grief.” It’s shown below without its final line.  I’ll explain momentarily why I’ve omitted it.

First, there is so much I love about this poem: the “distilled” quietness “as Twilight long begun” as fall approaches; the image of Nature “sequestering” herself in the afternoon – as the “Dusk drew earlier in”; the “foreign” look of the Morning as a courteous “Guest that would be gone.”  Then – without wing or the service of a keel – the Summer made her “light escape”  (and that multi-layered use of the word “light” – **chef’s kiss** ).
 
And then…
 
Here comes that final line that I omitted, and I removed it so that we could complete an experiment a la Ocean Vuong’s story.
 
Pretend you’ve written the poem.  Imagine you’re about to hand a copy to your professor.  However, you’ve completed the poem, the final line is there, and you’ve attempted to conclude the work with a line “the species has never encountered.”
 
What did you write?  How did you end the poem?

I’ll fill you in on Dickinson’s final line tomorrow.