Blackbird Archive
← v2n1, Spring 2003
Poetry · Volume 2, Number 1

Pitching Horseshoes

Claudia Emerson

Some of your buddies might come around

            for a couple of beers and a game,

but most evenings, you pitched horseshoes

alone. I washed up the dishes

            or watered the garden to the thudding

sound of the horseshoe in the pit,

or the practiced ring of metal

            against metal, after the silent

arc—end over end. That last

summer you played a seamless, unscored

            game against yourself, or night

falling, or coming in the house.

You were good at it. From the porch

            I watched you become shadowless,

then featureless, until I knew

you couldn't see either, and still

            the dusk rang out, your aim that easy;

between the iron stakes you had driven

griefmemorymarriagemortality
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 .