Claude before Time and Space: Poems

By Claudia Emerson

In Claude before Time and Space, her final collection, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Claudia Emerson quietly but fiercely explores the themes of mortality and time.

In the first section of this book, “The Wheel,” Emerson uses a rural southern setting in poems that reflect on memory, the self, and relationships. In section two, “Bird Ephemera,” she explores historical figures—from an early naturalist and writer who raised her children in poverty to a small-town doctor. The collection concludes with a series of poems named after the poet’s father. This illuminating body of work displays a master poet at the height of her craft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780807167885

Book preview

THE WHEEL

SWIMMING ALONE

for Ann Dickinson Beal

A half mile

          down the dirt road

                   to the house it passes

where an old woman lived

          until she died there,

                   the rooms still

comfortable in their cool

          emptiness; then, a half mile

                   farther past her, the farm pond

we find as empty. The widow

          was the one who told us

                   not to be afraid

          to do it, to swim

                   there alone. She said

                            she had long ago

formed the habit

          of this water’s solitude,

                   the habit of this

                            afternoon, all the late

afternoons conspiring

          to one: not exactly

                   swimming, the way

we suspend

          ourselves in water,

                   two old friends

who would say

          we are living alone,

                   divorced and listless in it,

in letting ourselves drift

          on what little current

                   survives the damming,

the push and pull

          of the small creek

                   that feeds this, makes it.

The water’s

          temperature is of nothing,

                   of the womb.

We love it that

          we can’t feel it

                   as anything as apart

from us. We never

          fail to speak of it. And

                   never fail to fall quiet

enough for the beaver,

          near-blind, to swim

                   so close to us

we can feel its wake,

          hear the fat slap of the tail.

                   There is the smell

of a hot innertube

          where dragonflies find us,

                   the blue of a widow skimmer

          net-veined that lights

                   on my island-hand,

                            its body broken

into syllables.

          Algae blooms unbroken,

                   a green roil,

thunder moseying

          around the hem of the water,

                   and I have become unafraid

even of lightning strikes.

          So when, now, this

                   afternoon years impossibly

          past, I learn she is dying,

                   there is selfish comfort

                            in knowing she is doing this

thing before me, the way

          she is in the middle

                   of the pond before I

can get there, not facing the dock,

          not waiting for me,

                   but away, considering

the other bank, a turtle

          dozing on a log,

                   the catfish visible

beneath the log, a snake’s

          head threading the air

                   above its body.

She is unafraid as I

          would have been afraid if I had

                   arrived before her, too timid

to leave the heat-

          splintered dock. If she is able

                   to imagine a place,

I imagine this is hers.

          And this poem is

                   not between us, not

          yet imagined, the living

                   we have yet to do

                            there in