Blackbird Archive
← v15n1, Spring 2016
Poetry · Volume 15, Number 1

Razor

Claudia Emerson

Yourself in the mirror, with him,

watching it, you have long memorized

the ritual, and cannot recall

a childhood morning without brush

and soap, straight razor, strop,

and you recall, too, the seldom nick,

the blood rarely brought. So when Claude

decides to quit, you know you will

lose to the rough black shadow

you used to love for him to bring

home—behind which, cleft and jaw,

you are disappearing, too,

the way he means for you to.

You don’t need to say the argument.

marriageagingbody
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 .