Poetry Thursday: Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson just won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her volume Late Wife, published by LSU Press.

I saw her read last year--or was it the year before?--at American University, and she was wonderful.

Stuart was with me. And Claudia Emerson's new husband (whose late first wife gave the book its poignant title) was with her.

And it was interesting, being and seeing that mirror image: me, a woman widowed, in the audience with the divorced man she now loves, attending the reading of poems by a woman, divorced, who loves a widowed man.

Homecoming

Claudia Emerson

The camera is trained on the door, no one
in the frame, only the dog sleeping. And then
finally, I see this was to surprise you,
filming your arrival, the dog's delight. Only now,
six years distant, can this seem scripted, meant:
the long, blank minutes she waited, absent
but there — behind the lens — as though she directs
me to notice the motion of her chest
in the rise and fall of the frame, and hear

to understand the one cough, nothing, the clearing
of her throat. Then, at last, you come home
to look into the camera she holds,
and past her into me — invisible, unimagined
other who joins her in seeing through our
transience the lasting of desire.