print previewback CLAUDIA EMERSON
Triptych
AFTER THE AFFAIR
There was no one to tell it to, so the guilt
settled in the lines of the house, in sills,
doorframes, ceilings. In the late afternoons
that followed, she heard what could have been someone
knocking, the cardinal beating its body against
the living room window as though desperate
to come inside. It could not see the space
beyond the glass, or know that it had been deceived
again into mistaking itself for something else.
At dusk, when the windows’ slow reversal
released it, turning instead to her own face, disfamiliar,
terrible, she also knew the same desire
to fly into that room, that house, some other woman.
STUDIO
She had said she needed this, and time,
to write, and often she had written here, the room
almost bare: only a desk beneath
tall, thin windows, a lamp, loveseat,
a dictionary the wind browsed—all sentient
with waiting. Then, when she could not abandon
the lie, grief became its sharper part, secreted
into the hours she was still obligated
to come here—the long mirror where she had
admired herself returning the pale gray
of a shadowless wall. The typewriter old, anchor-
heavy, she began again—filling sheet after
sheet with drafts she would abandon, the black
ribbon of ink spooling vowels, words, ragged
lines away from her in pale relief, her head
bowed beneath curtains so sheer they might have been
meaningless except in giving form
to the wind, when there was one.
THE GARDEN
She made her husband’s dinner in the afternoon,
then sealed it for him to warm up later while she gardened
well past dark. Used to it, he no longer complained.
Every morning she let in the neighbor’s gray cat;
she didn’t know his name, had never fed him,
but every day he returned, faithful, to spend
hours moving with the sun through her house in a drowsy
migration. Sometimes he followed her into the garden,
would rub against her legs as though comforting her,
as though he alone understood that every bulb she sank into this earth
was another stone sewn into the hem of her skirt. 
Reprinted from Figure Studies, 2008, with permission from Louisiana State University Press and Kent Ippolito.
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Triptych