Late Wife: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) by Claudia Emerson

Author:Claudia Emerson [Emerson, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2005-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Breaking Up the House

Every time I go back home, my mother

tells me I should begin to think now about

what I will and will not want—before

something happens and I have to. Each time

I refuse, as though somehow this is an argument

we’re having. After all, she and my father are still

keeping the house they’ve kept for half a century.

But I do know why she insists. She has

already done a harder thing than I will

have to do. She was only eighteen—

her mother and father both dead—when it fell

to her to break up the house, reduce

familiar rooms to a last order, a world

boxed and sealed. And while I know she would,

she cannot keep me from the house emptied

but for the pale ovals and rectangles

still nailed fast—cleaved to the walls where mirrors,

portraits had hung—persistent, sourceless shadows.

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