Rabies — Blackbird Archive

← v15n1, Spring 2016

Claude says beware when creatures lose their fear

of you, of daylight—become afraid instead

of water, even in hottest July. You cannot

trust what looks like taming, the skunk ambling

into the dooryard, fox slowed, a torporous

emergence from the trees, from the thorn-etched

bracken as though saved, answering God’s

call, or yours. Unmistakable,

the transfiguration you must destroy,

the single shot to the head, the severing of it

to send the skull—its brain—in a sack

to Richmond for the accounting, to prove

what you already know. The rest of it, though,

you are to burn at home in the barrel with the trash.

rural-life animals illness

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 .