'My life had stood - a Loaded Gun- in corners - til a day/The Owner passed identified-And carried Me away/Though I than He - may longer live/He longer must-than I- For I have but the power to kill/Without-the power to die-' My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson

When he took both the power to kill and to die by stabbing himself in the heart on October 21 2003, I began to think almost daily about Elliot Smith. Around the same time, I watched the documentary "Loaded Gun: Life, Death and Dickinson" and began imagining Elliot Smith in love with Emily Dickinson. I see him leaving flowers at her headstone (died: 1886). I glimpse him studying this fierce scribe in Amherst's gloomy caverns-- the Massachusetts town where locals referred to resident Miss Dickinson as "the shadow," because she was such a total recluse. Coincidentally, Hampshire College in Amherst is where Elliot Smith's began his education in Philosophy, and where I'm certain, he read all the poems by his lyrical soul mate.

"Defiantly unknowable;" "a killer poet;" "Private person;" scholars say this of the life and works of Emily Dickinson. The same words could apply as easily to Elliot Smith. I interviewed Ellliot Smith in the spring of 1997, the day before the album Either/Or was finished, and we talked about books. Elliot said his reading list was not out of the 19th century yet. He added, "I'm usually reading something that someone's giving me shit for because it's not Gen-X." I believe now that Elliot Smith professed his love for Emily Dickinson's 19th century poems, and I wish I had picked up the cue.

So, I've turned something Elliot Smith said more than five years ago into a wing-nut theory. It's the revisionism typical of the bereft. It's typical of the living to piece together scraps left by the dead; a refusal to let the unanswered questions go to the grave.

I believe Dickinson's poems are as parchment paper over some of Elliot Smith's lyrics. The song "A Question Mark" on XO speaks to Dickinson's potent inscription to God or the great unknown: /Giving back a little hatred now to the world/Cuz it treated you bad/You couldn't keep the great unknown/From making you mad. There's a grudging and irritable agnosticism in many of Dickinson's poems. Take 'Poem 1552': Those--dying then/Knew where they went/They went to God's Right Hand/That Hand is amputated now/And God cannot be found/The abdication of Belief /Makes the Behavior small/Better an ignis fatuus/Than no illume at all-- .