Claudia Emerson

The town’s trees, roomy with winter, have begun of late to fill with them, a settling that commences with dusk. The widows complain — claim they can smell them, can hear them shuffling in the trees, a wing hitting a branch a sound sharp, they say, as ice cracking. They cannot sleep. And so you form a committee, convening with shotguns to fire every night into the darkling congregation. Every night, the air resounds with that resolve, and every dusk they return with theirs, circle, a lazy familiar vortex around a drain, an old appointment they keep with an inescapable place; this argument no way, Claude says, to be any less afraid.

One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail above the door, still losing its luck, and a work-collar swings, an empty old noose. The silence waits, wild to be broken by hoofbeat and heavy harness slap, will founder but remain; while, outside, above the stable, eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low in lazy loops, a loose black warp of patience, bearing the blank sky like a pall of wind on mourning wings. But the bones of this place are long picked clean. Only the hayrake's ribs still rise from the rampant grasses.

The my becomes a the, becomes the state’s the coroner’s, a law’s, something assignable, by me, alone, though it will not be the I I am on leaving it, no longer to be designated human or corpse:cadaver it will be, nameless patient stored in the deep hold of the hospital as in the storage of a ghost ship run aground — the secret in it that will, perhaps, stir again the wind that failed. It will be preserved, kept like larva, like a bullet sealed gleaming in its chamber. They will gather around it, probe and sample, argue — then return it to its between- world, remove their aprons and gloves and stroll, some evenings, a city block for a beer, a glass of chilled white wine. Even there, they will continue to speak of it, what they glean from beneath the narrative of scars, surgical cavities, the wondrous mess it became before I left it to them with what’s left of me, this name, a signature, a neatened suture, perfect, this last, selfish stitch.

yours is not the majestic Gypsy the Codling    Luna    Wax or grander Atlas with the appetite of a plague     entire fields succumbing to them    whole generations of bees    this is the unseen    closeted    unassuming gray that seeks out last winter’s cloth    another season    drawn to the body’s scent    what was its heat    to consume early    that scant much of you    fragile    lace-like the constellate    erasures    of the coat it makes for you to wear

She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistle dangling, on her suit a dutiful, faded red cross. Mine her only life to guard, she does for a while watch the middle-aged woman who has nothing better to 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 lap of elementary backstroke perfectly executed within the taut confines of 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 toward shallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible to reenter my own wake, reverse it.

My brother's funeral over, the dark-clothed congregation clots the church doors, a lingering aftermath moving into flat light—the sky low and swollen, a storm siren's long expansive notes, evenly measured, so loud the pauses between ring with aftersound. Used to it, no one here appears alarmed, the church ladies filing into his house bearing heavy covered dishes, the funeral flowers. On the muted television tuned to the weather, a small area of Watch now upgrades to Warning; the words stream across the bottom of the screen calling conditions perfect, this town, this house disappeared beneath the map's isolated lesion, its red edges uneven, stalled. The forecasters rely they say on spotters to confirm what the radar cannot—they call it ground truth; until then no one knows anything for certain beyond this inward watching. The room hums, an airless, crowded hive. Their mouths are full, plates layered—fried chicken, deviled eggs, casseroles, bright congealed salads with fruit suspended inside. All of it dust. I have come here too late, his body gone, already ash. The storm's body could be forming now, tightening from cloud to the gyre that will consume its path, all of it a becoming—spiraling a wall of water, mud, dust, and sand; with dispassion taking up into itself the fence line, a barn—the house beside them spared with the same dispassion. Or this, more likely now: siren silenced, the winds diminishing, the light, afternoon's concession to another dusk—severe, more common truth.

Most of the things you made for me—blanket- chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker—I gave away to friends who could use them and not be reminded of the hours lost there, not having been witness to those designs, the tedious finishes. But I did keep the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors, most of these years it has been invisible, part of the wall, or defined by reflection— safe—because reflection, after all, does change. I hung it here in the front, dark hallway of this house you will never see, so that it might magnify the meager light, become a lesser, backward window. No one pauses long before it. But this morning, as I put on my overcoat, then straightened my hair, I saw outside my face its frame you made for me, admiring for the first time the way the cherry you cut and planed yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.

It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched. It was always possible for you to run the table, leave me nothing. But I recall the easy shot you missed, and then the way we both studied, circling—keeping what you had left me between us.

The world has certified itself rid of all but the argument: to eradicate or not the small stock of variola frozen, quarantined—a dormancy it has refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile lens, her glass slide a clearest, most becoming pane. How could it resist slipping away with her, that discrete first pock?

The word itself: prim, retired, its artifact her portrait above the fireplace, on her face the boredom she abhorred, then perfected, her hands held upward—their emptiness a revision, cigarette and brandy snifter painted, intolerably, out, to leave her this lesser gesture:What next? or shrugged Whatever. From the waist down she was never there.