Figure Studies

Poems

Claudia Emerson

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780807143155
• eBook ISBN: 9780807143148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called "All Girls School, " offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively "school" -- or refuse to -- the poems explore ways girls are "trained" in the broadest sense of the word."Gossips, " the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In "Early Lessons, " the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.
The Mannequin above Main Street Motors
When the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable,
one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee
and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark -- drunken impulse -- and for years kept her
leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk
was also perpetual in the garage below, punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close
over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted
stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted
there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing
sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained, back turned forever to the dark storage
behind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up
to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing -- her expression still reluctant figure for it.

I
ALL GIRLS SCHOOL

Thus the object of secluding women at menstruation is to neutralize the dangerous influences which are supposed to emanate from them at all such times. That the danger is believed to be especially great at the first menstruation appears from the unusual precautions taken to isolate girls at this crisis. Two of these precautions have been illustrated above, namely, the rules that girls may not touch the ground nor see the sun. The general effect of these rules is to keep her suspended, so to say, between heaven and earth. Whether enveloped in her hammock and slung up on the roof, as in South America, or raised above the ground in a dark and narrow cage, as in New Ireland, she may be considered to be out of the way of doing mischief, since, being shut off both from the earth and from the sun, she can poison neither of these great sources of life by her deadly contagion. In short, she is rendered harmless by being, in electrical language, insulated.

Sir George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

Ranged on benches down the sides of the room, the eighty girls sat motion less and erect: a quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl was visible. . . . [I]t suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The Physical Plant

Everything here measures: weight, effort, sin—
and everything costs in this seclusion

of daughters—the place an ark, its hold
all of a kind in an archaic, combed

order: straightened teeth, trained spines, the chapel’s
benches in rigid rows before crimson

kneeling pillows, slim beds in dormitories,
the muted ticking of practice rooms, horses’ stalls

just-mucked, the halls humid with breathing.
And in the brushes, their hair—enough to line

the nests of a hundred generations of birds.

Headmaster

He rocks up onto the balls of his feet,
clears his throat to lead the assembly

with a voice more familiar than their fathers’,
brothers’, those distant as only kin can be. The girls

surround him, the youngest sitting on the floor, close
enough to notice in his loafers the clean,

empty slits where the pennies are supposed to go.

Housemother

This life began as mere employment, something
that would pass; she had private joys then,

reasons to close her door. This is how she breathes
now, moving sharklike through the halls’ courses,

sensing the constant blood of wakefulness,
girls’ hands swimming—pale fish—into and out of tense

bodies held still as water dense with early blooming.

Anatomical Model

They have retired her, alongside turtles’
shells, bees’ nests, and the skeletons of birds,

to a narrow glass closet. She is antique
but not inaccurate—headless, armless,

all torso, a sculpture mutilated. The breast
lifts off, easy as the lid from a pot, the heart

and lungs beneath; the belly comes away then

from neat intestines, from the chalky fetus nestled

in the womb worn smooth from all the hands
reaching in for this conclusion.

The Girls Dissect the Eye of a Cow

They gather around it, bored or enthralled
in the aqueous chamber, center of the blind

spot, pupil, iris. It has been released
from its orbit, from the body’s confinement,

the sullen, perpetual cud, fence line, salt lick
and sun, from long nights spent wading in ruminant

fog. They cannot reconcile themselves
with this thing intent on them, whether

eye of the wind, the needle, or heaven.

Latin Teacher

Seamed stockings, sensible shoes, cardigan
buttoned all the way to the top, she greets

each of them by name as they enter her classroom
rebellious, identical. They want Italian,

French, a younger teacher—anything
but this woman fluent in a language

that will not travel—the deep south of her vowels
slow as the minute hand on the grinding clock

behind her. Her hair is braided and coiled, contained
in a bun substantial as a hornets’ nest—ashen gray.

But their mothers also were made to take it—
translations all the more hated for being inherited.

Then they are assigned to her table in the din
of the dining room, where she directs them

to eat even popsicles with a knife and fork.
She serves fried chicken by inq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Mannequin above Main Street Motors
• I ALL GIRLS SCHOOL
• II GOSSIPS
• III EARLY LESSONS
• IV