Home > Poetry Magazine > Frame, An Epistle

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Frame, An Epistle

By Claudia Emerson b. 1957 Claudia Emerson

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.

Source: Poetry (July 2003).

Biography

Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, Claudia Emerson studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Emerson’s poetry, steeped in the Southern Narrative tradition, bears the influences of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Betty Adcock, and William Faulkner. Of the collection Late Wife (2005), poet Deborah Pope observed, “Like the estranged lover in one of her poems who pitches horseshoes in the dark with preternatural . . .

Continue reading this biography