FreeVerse - Claudia Emerson

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Claudia Emerson is one of the poets Ted Kooser recommended in the workshop I attended. Her Pulitzer Prize winning Late Wife collection is wonderful. The majority of the book is divided into three sections, "Divorce Epistles", "Breaking up the House", and "Late Wife: Letters to Kent". I've featured one from each section.

Metaphor

We didn't know what woke us - just
cold moving, lighter than our breathing.

The world bound by an icy ligature,
our house was to the bat a warmer

hollowness that now it could not
leave. I screamed for you to do something.

So you killed it with the broom,
cursing, sweeping the air. I wanted

you to do it - until you did.


Breaking Up the House

Every time I go back home, my mother
tells me I should begin to think now about
what I will and will not want - before
something happens and I have to. Each time

I refuse, as though somehow this is an argument
we're having. After all, she and my father are still
keeping the house they've kept for half a century.
But I do know why she insists. She has

already done a harder thing than I will
have to do. She was only eighteen -
her mother and father both dead - when it fell
to her to break up the house, reduce

familiar rooms to a last order, a world
boxed and sealed. And while I know she would,
she cannot keep me from the house emptied
but for the pale ovals and rectangles

still nailed fast - cleaved to the walls where mirrors,
Portraits had hung - persistent, sourceless shadows.


Driving Glove

I was unloading groceries from the trunk
of what had been her car, when the glove floated
up from underneath the shifting junk -
a crippled umbrella, the jack, ragged
maps. I knew it was not one of yours,
this more delicate, soft, made from the hide
of a kid or lamb. It still remembered
her hand, the creases where her fingers

had bent to hold the wheel, the turn
of her palm, Smaller than mine. There was
nothing else to do but return it -
let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water
to rest on the bottom where I have not
forgotten it remains - persistent in its loss.