Claudia Emerson

This week’s poem is by Claudia Emerson: "Greengrocer." It appeared in our Spring 2012 issue on the state of American Poetry. To download a high-resolution PDF of this image, click here.

Having made the maze of cartons, bins,
and scales, he moves, aproned, unseen among them,
the architectures his to build and rebuild

They are here, in the eaves, the clothesline pole,
hayloft—everywhere she looks—and everywhere
she goes they are there before her, in town

It was not death we came to fear but her life,
her other birth, waking remade from the womb

of that disease. One leg was withered, a dragging-

The forecast had not predicted it,
and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk

and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.

All around her, we sounded melons, practiced
at hearing what we couldn’t see, pretending not
to notice when she stopped at the stall where the Amish

How she must have dreaded us and our sweaty coins, more
than we hated practice, the lessons, scales, the winter-hot parlor,

her arthritic hands, the metronome’s awful tick. She lectured