Blackbird Archive
← v7n1, Spring 2008
Poetry · Volume 7, Number 1

Esto Absoluta

Claudia Emerson

Despite the hallway lined with a hundred years

of girls framed in graduation white‚

they can allow themselves to imagine the detritus

of classrooms‚ laboratories—beakers and vials—

mingling with leaf dust‚ and wasps passing

unhurried through the windows’ paneless grid

to nest in the halls’ mute bells. Rain comes in‚

snow‚ then slower ivy in dusky air. Pigeons‚

ubiquitous‚ whose placid voices have long

accompanied such dreaming‚ enter their rooms

as though enrolled‚ resigned to the girls’ fate‚

to the blackboard’s chalky refusals—latent equations‚

declensions‚ proofs—all their failed erasures.

childhoodtimeplace
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 .