The Last Christmas

The Last Christmas


We were both sick. I had lost my voice;
you were feverish, coughing. I had
to split the kindling myself.
We’d been without power for two days–
the spindling cedar darkening
the room. The lines, still sleeved in ice,
sagged all afternoon above
the arc of the axe, the lift and fall
of the edge you made sure it kept.
It was late when I watched the blade
graze wood and keep falling toward me.
I felt it brush my pant leg close.
As a cat, harmless. I quit then, certain
I had let it fall where it wanted,
not into seasoned wood but into me.
Surely, the ice would never melt,
the pines would not straighten, I’d never
speak. Later, when I carried up
your supper on a tray, you woke–
pale, glazed from the fever breaking–
and told me you’d worried when the sound
of splintering stopped. You were sure
you had gotten up from your sickbed
to look out that very window.
You said my mouth was open, but I was
too far away and you could not hear me:
I was small, mute beneath the window frame,
your breath forming, freezing on the panes
until you could not see me,
and there was nothing you could do.


Emerson, Claudia.

Late Wife Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Posted over on Virginia Women In History