Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

There are some people who begin to hear the ticking of the clock louder and louder in their lives, that relentless reminder that death is somewhere up ahead. They study it, try to pry at death’s secrets, and if they are writers, they chronicle it.

Claudia Emerson (1957-2014) wrote a lot of poems with death in them, not in a resigned or a morbid way, but exploring with words her encounters with its many faces, from the bones of a bird to the ending of a marriage, and the cancer treatment which ultimately failed to keep her alive.

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Bone

It was first dark when the plow turned it up.
Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-ruddled, nothing
but itself, the tendon’s bored eye threading
a ponderous needle. And yet the pocked fist
of one end dared what was undone
in the strewing, defied the mouth of the hound
that dropped it.
. . . . The whippoorwill began
again its dusk-borne mourning. I had never
seen what urgent wing disembodied
the voice, would fail to recognize its broken
shell or shadow or its feathers strewn
before me. As if afraid of forgetting,
it repeated itself, mindlessly certain.
. . . . . . . . Here.
I threw the bone toward that incessant claiming,
and watched it turned by rote, end over end over end.

“Bone” from Pinion: An Elegy, © 2002 by Claudia Emerson –
Louisiana State University Press

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