Seed — Blackbird Archive

← v15n1, Spring 2016

The way he would have his grammar, the subjunctive

mood he did not learn in school, Claude studies this

garden that will not be, the fact of it

a thick patch of grass that needs cutting,

the fig bush and pear tree. The lettuces

should have gone in first; dark ruffles of kale,

then the peas and beans, the better boys. You could still

plant a gourd or two; you know how to manipulate

a neck so that it becomes straightest handle—

its emptiness for dipping water or feed. And you

linger over the picture of a cotton boll—

one slim envelope of seed you could still order.

Because you don’t know when you won’t be able

to get to town, and you could need to pack a tooth, after all.

rural-life aging mortality

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 .