I had the immense blessing of writing poetry under the guidance of Claudia Emerson when I was in college. She was at Mary Wash for many years, but has since moved on. Her office was a place of beauty on an already beautiful campus- full of light and treasures and wisdom. I am thankful for all the time we spent talking about poetry, about books, about trees, about life (and how much of these things are the same).
Her poetry has inspired me for years and I consider it one of the great honors of my educational life to know her and to have had her input in my own writing. She is currently battling cancer, and today, underwent a brain probe. She is resilient and brave, but such a battle should not have to be fought by anyone. Keep her and her family in your thoughts!
(from Blackbird: a poem from her forthcoming collection)
A Partial Ledger: Dr. C.D. Bennett
The 11th of July 1914—
and a leper is made as clean as this:
in a log house on a tobacco farm in a storeless
churchless mostly roadless place they call
Flint Hill—a bed by the window for whatever
air moves from the field through it: this one
comes into the world scrawny and will be
small—worried over—then tall and thin—
that thick shock of black hair for now a glossy
patent crowning the day before him—
a first entry—live infant—the flesh
untouched and scarless—the body unfolding
as though for the first time in my hands—no part
that was not made to open
open: and the breath
in the mouth of the deaf mute something I am
not to doubt can be opened at just the words—
I am not to doubt what words can open: he cannot
hear them first to know what they mean: like placing
a hand to a closed door—the palm can sense
the fire or cold behind it: I can smell
the sugar on the breath: I wear my thermometer
in my watch pocket—encased in chased aluminum
on a chain—its glass having lain beneath
all their tongues—its mercury having measured
their fevers: no instruments for seeing in—
I watch with the naked eye to mark where the mercury
reaches—look at the white of the eye—the aperture
of the pupil—the back of the throat: and so I listen
to what courses along the capillary bore
of the stethoscope—a closeness I can feel
in the eardrum: the sound of the bowels, of the heart: pneumonia
I have come to hear as the old person’s friend—
the way the breathing goes away quiet
as in a drowning in a pond—an angel
from it I listen for in the lungs:
everyone has
owed me for this—for something—the years of bleeding
ceased—crooked bones made straight—and they have paid—
telling everyone—as I told them not to—
with buttermilk (quarts)—berries (pecks)—greens (messes)—
eggs and eggs—chickens—some alive—some
dressed for the oven—perishables—all
here—recorded: when they have little they name
their sons for me—when they have nothing—let me
name their daughters:
in the King James: a ginkgo
leaf tied and knotted surgical-neat with red thread
to a wild violet pressed deep into the text—
I have forgotten the why of some miracle
underlined—all the miracles underlined—
every one I thought to be instructive—
must have thought to memorize:
now I make
my own accounts—drawings—eye-drafts of maladies—
and I harvest what I can—gall stones—kidney stones—
a ganglion cyst—necrotic finger—
all bottled in formaldehyde—labeled
by date and name—lessons for someone else
I shelve behind the textbooks—behind all
the possibilities—my ended causes:
with the consumption—fever—the faithless blind—
the influenza: there is the time the lightning
strikes the plow and kills the mule and the one
behind the mule: the time it strikes a nail
at the back of the head of someone leaning against
a country store—out on the porch just to watch
the storm blow in—the body blown out of its chair—
its shoes: the time a boy is feeding sugarcane
into the press and he feeds his hand into it
too—and the mule keeps moving like the hour hand
on a clock face: they have to coax it to back up
as though to undo the hour that cannot be
undone: the hand I can save—a withered thing
for the handle of a hoe—but cannot reverse
any more than I can the wasting
despair that comes with the hoe blade—that one
dull tooth working the shell it will never
break through: and still I consider the text:
spitting on the ground—my spittle a wet-
shimmering pearl in the dust—and with the clay I make of it
I place it on the eyes and tell the man
to wash in a pond he has never seen, and ask him:
what do you see? as you ought?: and I will let that
be the first thing that he sees: his face
in a pool of clearest water—then—
trees walking across it—toward me.
