Claudia Emerson

Ephemeris

The household sells in a morning, but when
 
they cannot let the house itself go for
 
the near-nothing it brings at auction,
 
the children, all beyond their middle years,
 
carry her back to it, the mortgage now
 
a dead pledge of patience. Almost emptied,
 
there is little evidence that she ever
 
lived in it: a rented hospital bed
 
in the kitchen where the breakfast table
 
stood, a borrowed coffee pot, chair,
 
a cot for the daughter she knows, and then does not.
 
But the world seems almost right, the near–
 
familiar curtainless windows, the room
 
neat, shadow-severed, her body’s thinness,
 
like her gown’s, a comfort now. Perhaps
 
she thinks it death and the place a lesser
 
heaven, the hereafter a bed, the night
 
to herself, rain percussive in the gutters—
 
enough. But like hers, the light sleep of spring
 
has worsened—forsythia blooming
 
in what should be deep winter outside
 
the window—until it resembles the shallow
 
sleep of a house with a newborn in it,
 
a middle child she never saw, a boy
 
who lived not one whole day (an afternoon?
 
an evening?) sixty years ago in late
 
August. And as though born without a mouth,
 
like a summer moth, he never suckled
 
and was buried without a name. She had waked to that—
 
that cusp of summer, crape myrtles’ clotted
 
blooms languishing, anemic, the cicadas
 
exuberant as they have always been
 
in their clumsy dying.
 
 
 
This middle-born
 
is now the nearer, no, the only child.
 
The undertaker’s wife has not bathed
 
and dressed him; the first day’s night instead
 
has passed, quickening into another
 
day, and another, and he is again awake,
 
his fist gripping a spindle of turned light,
 
and he is ravenous in his cradle of air.
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