Student Conference, and: Late April House Fire along Interstate 81, and: Lifeguard, and: Namesake

Abstract

Student Conference, and: Late April House Fire along Interstate 81, and: Lifeguard, and: Namesake Claudia Emerson (bio) Student Conference At first, I mistook the small, black tattoofor a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist's paler underside—then suspected stitches when it didn't fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful,deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief griefof the father who saw in her a worsening resemblance.) I imagined what it tookfor her to enter the parlor, where nothing—garish [End Page 63] bird, snake, broken heart—could tempt her,turn her from the small, determined letters: think. The word she had purchased moved faintlyin what she must have thought would be permanence above her pulse, her body's argumentto think what she wished she could still feel, arm bared for another cominginto being, the needle's indelible sting. Late April House Fire along Interstate 81 We had wondered aloud for some timeabout its source, the smoke a fixed roiling column visible for miles, unchangedby the wind that had all day blown across the road with pollen and bees a fine spring snowsalting fields newly greening, the redbuds livid beneath it. By the time we came upon it,fire was integral, part of the two-story, wood-frame farm house—still itself, completelywhole, composed: white clapboard, porch and roof, front door, window frames—glass panes intact—the chimneys that would survive, calm inside [End Page 64] the flames' straight rush—contained, bright-risingenravishment. We knew this was nothing like the worse resolve of another hourwhen the gravity of fire would have succumbed to the old habit of collapse, the sift of slowash down on all that does not burn—hinges, latches, doorknobs, keys still sunk in the locks.Before night the wind would return and with it a roomy swarm of snow, pollen, sootthat would pass through what remained; windowless and without walls, the air, uneasy, would settleinto something almost familiar, a dull anguish not yet grief. And so we slowedbut did not stop to watch someone else's tragedy burn past this brief, nearlybeautiful suspension that changes nothing. Lifeguard She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistledangling, on her suit a dutiful, faded red cross. Mine her only lifeto guard, she does for a while watch [End Page 65] the middle-aged woman who has nothing betterto do than swim laps in the Y's indoor pool on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow,though, boring, length after predictable length of breaststroke or the duller lapof elementary backstroke perfectly executed within the taut confinesof the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me to study split ends, hangnail, wristwatch,until—the body of the whistle cupped loosely in her palm—her head nods towardshallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible,to reenter my own wake, reverse it. Namesake While still a child, she sensed her name—spoken,shouted, whispered, laughed, and called and called and called—was not fully hers, having been firsther grandmother's, someone her mother never knew except through weary stories the childlessaunts told and retold, memories the stuff [End Page 66] of patterned lace, fragile, impractical—but lasting. So—though she had come to herself in the familiar, dark wood of it—she had learnedthat every time she answered or refused its voicing over her shoulder, the name was not all she hadto share but also its early vanishing, and that when she did appear, she was near revenantand at once perishing, impossible disappointment, and she could not know whom to rage against,the one who called, the one who would not come. [End Page 67] Claudia Emerson Claudia Emerson's poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and New England Review. She is the author of several books including Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion, An Elegy; and Late Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She is currently...