Acre — Blackbird Archive

← v15n1, Spring 2016

You should know better than to rent that acre

alongside the river to those boys you know

will plant it in corn only to cut it right before

hunting season so that the whole week it’s lying there:

stalks and sweet ears and tassels by the water the deer

already have made slick paths to, the field

drawing them bolder and bolder to it as something

natural, a given. But hasn’t Claude placed a rabbit trap

long and narrow in a similar fashion? True.

The difference is when you’ve proved you can lead

something with a .22 and kill it without a thought.

That’s how you earn the trap, when you can foretell

that kind of zag and not sit lazy up in a tree

looking down on that one fertile field you still think you have rights to.

rural-life nature family

Claudia Emerson

Claudia Emerson is a professor of English and the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is the author of four books: Figure Studies: Poems (2008), Late Wife (2005), Pinion: An Elegy (2002), and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), all from Louisiana State University Press. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Poetry, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, and New England Review .