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Some of Claudia Emerson's poems from her Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry, 'Late Wife' Date published: 4/18/2006
Artifact For three years you lived in your house just as it was before she died: your wedding portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging in the closet, her hair still in the brush. You have told me you gave it all away then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation cross she wore, her name in cursive chased on the gold underside, your ring in the same box, those photographs you still avoid, and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed-- small things. Months after we met, you told me she had made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft. Daybook This is the season of her dying, and you have kept it, I find, underneath the stairs in a box filled with photographs--her daybook of that last year, the calendar a narrative she did not intend to write. In the grid of days, I see her habit had been to record in pencil what might be erased, moved, saving the indelible black for what could not change: your birthday, hers, your anniversary. And in that same decisive hand, the disease began to eclipse this order, but she erased nothing. Now from beneath the days the hospital claimed, her first, latent words emerge, faint but certain as images of ribs cradling milky lungs, the flesh forgotten as water you can see through to the bottom.
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
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