December 5, 2014
Friday

        — her daybook
of that last year, the calendar a narrative
she did not intend to write. In the grid
of days, I see her habit had been to record
in pencil what might be erased, moved, saving
the indelible black for what could not change. . .
— Claudia Emerson, 1957-2014
American poet
from “Daybook,” in Late Wife

As I said yesterday, I cannot find my copy of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife. I have read it, in ways I do not usually read a volume of poetry: cover-to-cover, more than once, dipping back in here and there. But it has disappeared, gone fugitive, in one of the piles that proliferate so easily around here. But I knew the poem I wanted to use today, and found it readily online. (Click on the title above to read the entire piece.)

Claudia Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for Late Wife. LSU Press, the publisher, describes it thus:

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker’s rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses.

Claudia Emerson married musician Kent Ippolito in 2000. It was the second marriage for each. Emerson was divorced after 19 years. As noted above, Ippolito was a widower. As I meditated on the news of Claudia’s death yesterday and today, I came to realize that Kent Ippolito is making his second trip down the difficult road of widowhood, and I wept for him.

This is the season for calendar making, of setting up new ones, transferring information from the old ones, mapping out the grids of our days. Like the late wife whose daybook is found packed away in a box full of photographs, I record most items in pencil, even my Thursday morning spiritual study group meetings, an appointment I consider nearly inviolable. That’s how I could note in December the July dates when “Sewanee begins” and “Sewanee ends,” and erase them in June when it became certain I was not going to be invited from the wait list. The Sewanee Writers’ Conference still began and ended on those dates, but I was not there, missing my last opportunity to hear Claudia Emerson read, to hear her laugh.

I’m filling up December with a narrative I did not expect to write: I’ll see a cardiologist on December 30, a physical therapist next week for the twinges in my lower back from a surgical adventure in 1982 that have suddenly reasserted themselves. I have a funeral to attend on Monday, and Ron’s followup to be available for at a time next Thursday not yet specified. I should probably have my 2015 calendar available. That December date with the cardiologist is surely only an introduction. I’ll be penciling in the dates for Sewanee, Colgate, Bread Loaf, the deadlines for applications. My eraser will be ready.