Judith Harris: “Every Changing Figure”
EVERY CHANGING FIGURE
(elegy for my friend Claudia Emerson)
xxx
Hair
Her messages now came more rapidly,
staccato texts, tapped on her smart phone:
Bone mets. Broke arm. Had surgery.
The week after that: So fat from edema. I look pregnant.
My hair is fuzzing back in weird. I hate this.
Her once-thick, iron-gray mane is
growing back in, a youthful shade
of chestnut brown.
Knowing what she wants, I offer experience:
It comes in curly but straightens.
Give yourself a month for every inch or two.
That much time.
xxx
Butterflies
Once, of nowhere, she looked to absolutes,
the existential bliss of what is, to wings applauding:
Did you know that butterflies
breathe with their wings?
On the day she died, I sensed one hover near,
landing, not there among the flowers—
but here on the limb of my heart.
xxx
God
She believed in God. I knew that—
“I’ll pray for you.”
She was raised to be virtuous.
Or, when wanting to confess a transgression,
I’m not a perfect person.
(Uranium…it’s a carcinogen…it was
inside the walls of my church,
even my Sunday school)
Christ was to her the innocent—a gentle lamb.
Despite the horror, her rage
at being forsaken, she became
that perfect person:
bestowing upon Him her final mercy.
xxx
“Late Wife”
She met her second husband
at her divorce-coming-out-party:
who throws themselves a party on the worse day of their lives?
He played bluegrass, wore a long beard
that curled at the end,
and on the first night he seduced her with his
collection of guitars and fiddles,
touching the polished wood, as if
beseeching a woman’s flesh. . .
and arousing the sleeping strings’
infinite potential.
xxx
The Poet
She was writing elegies for her father,
her brother, a sacrificed calf, for the moth
on her Oriental rug, even for the Motel Astra,
all the while, it was not she, but the earth
that was dying, and like Keats
she wanted to leave this world unseen,
and fade away from the forest dim
into the forest dim. . .
her last poems, I told her,
works of rival genius.
xxx
The Worst Day
It was spring, and she was on her upgraded smartphone,
sitting among relics of a playground.
The oncologist promised to call by 3:00
with her CT scan results.
After three months of chemo, near her normal weight,
liver enzymes were in range, white counts coming up.
Then, I heard a click, and she said it was the doctor
trying to break in. We were disconnected.
Minutes later, she called back, her voice monotone,
in shock: cancer had spread to other organs.
She stopped talking, hurled the phone
into the weeds with all her strength,
the static on my side sizzling with insane heat
that felt like eternity
until there was a faint bristling in the grass
something dormant stirring back to life.
She blindly groped for the phone,
bringing it back to her ear, still connected—
then the line went dead.
xxx
Metonymy
When we grieve, we often envision the dead
cinematically, close-ups of a single detail:
a porcelain earring crease in an earlobe,
a hand or an inoculation mark,
and what image kept floating back to me
was her long, pale, freckled neck,
wearing a string of classic pearls,
like a southern debutant’s, long before
she acquiesced to teaching at the girls’ school.
Meeting her at the Library of Congress,
after the removal of her thyroid, and having shed
her winter coat
for a light green jacket, she stepped off the curb,
waving both arms at me, we embraced before she pulled back,
eager to show me the minuscule white hair-line scar
at the base of her throat. Don’t you think it’s horrible?
I said I’d have missed it completely,
if she hadn’t just pointed it out.
xxx
Down to Chatham, to See Mama
Those long drives home to see Mama, as she reclined
the passenger seat, or sitting up to pour over students’ papers
piled on her lap, she’d call when there was good reception,
and we would gossip about her ex, or about poets
we were secretly jealous of. We’re going into a tunnel;
if I lose you, I’ll call you back.
She always called back, from the dark roads
winding through the mountains, the stubbly trees and dust clouds,
still echoing as she rode out of the caved rocks
into the brash light of afternoon leaning into white pillars of pine.
Meanwhile, Mama, short, plump, was already slicing up
the Sunday ham just so, as she sank in her seat, gazing out,
watching the scenery rushing by,
stretching her long limbs however she could
before feeling a cramp coming,
letting her words drift, drift…
xxx
Last-Minute Pedicure
Her one “hedonistic indulgence,” after months of chemo,
was to go to her favorite little salon
and sit in the throne-like chair, lowering her feet
and swollen ankles into the sudsy whirlpool,
as the stylist pumiced her soles, polished her toenails,
and applied a final shiny topcoat.
Staggering back down, purse in one hand,
cane in another, settling into a window seat,
she waited for the polish to dry, wiggling her toes,
delighted, and glanced down to admire
her pale virginal flesh contrasted
with the red, lusty artifice.
xxx
All Darkness
The last time I heard her voice, she called
to ask about my migraines, What do they feel like,
do they block your sight?
She said was going blind in one eye.
I told her to go the ophthalmologist.
But she went to the ER. Later, she told me there were
lesions on her brain.
A flock of geese passing over caught my eye
against the window glass,
Are you there, can you still hear me?
I thought about how scientific she was,
Her last poem observing geese in equal intervals,
acting as one body, flocking there
in formation, and I buried my head
in my arm,
its stifling of sound, and when there
was silence, they had already dispersed.
xxx
Rage
She lashed out at me once—the reason was trivial.
Not rational. She even threatened to demote me
from Friend (with a capital F) to friend (lower case)
and slammed the proverbial door behind her.
I didn’t know if she’d ever let me back in.
But her messages resumed, again frequent,
again signed off with “love,”
followed by her first initial C,
the fickle period.
xxx
Wish
She loved the physical world, a dream
that carried her still, weightless in
the shadow of a winged bird
she could not name, its song lost on
wind in the flue. The last words she wrote
to me: I am afraid, no contraction, time slowing.
I want to believe that she heard the gale
wind blow, saw the light sifting its grays into coppers
above the shining cluster of grape hollyhock leaves—
her favorite—draped around the trellis
of her secluded porch,
its denizen spiders weaving their
mausoleum of intricacies,
the garden birdbath freezing over,
a slush of rainwater and the leaves
succumbing to the late light of dusk,
her prayers fed to the night’s darkness,
her pieties light-struck before darkness,
and fell then into the soft and acheless sleep,
and armless arms of all that mattered.
Judith Harris is the author of three poetry books (LSU and Tiger Bark) and two critical books on poetry and psychoanalysis (SUNY Press, Routledge Press). Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, New Republic, Hudson Review, North American Review, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literary Matters, Poetry East, Terrain, American Life in Poetry, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-day, Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, and Verse Daily. She was close friends with Claudia Emerson from 2006 to 2014.