“Sewing Bird” [transcription, 2007 manuscript] by Claudia Emerson

← v20n1, Spring 2021

Sewing Bird [transcription, 2007 manuscript]

No bigger than the span of any woman’s

hand, this one was cast in ornate brass,

even the thumb key, designed to clamp the bird

to the table’s edge, decorative, vine-chased.

A small velvet cushion for needles

and pins wears like a prissy saddle,

fast the cotton, wool, or muslin—rarer

lace—the stuff of the nest its gag: trousers,

aprons, christening gown—a wedding dress’s

seams felled so perfectly the inside was

as flawless as the out. Where the syrinx

nestled, warm song-chamber inside the body

of any living bird that might have sung

outside the window, spring steel still recalls

the stricture of its hidden coil, a singular

memory. Its strength in such closure,

the mouth shut to the finished task—the bird’s

only lyric measured and cut to be worn,

torn, mended—and handed down—soundless

cloth the swaddling of yet another’s voice.

marriage history craft

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 .