“Temporary Madness”
Book Excerpt: Ungrafted
Temporary Madness
Perhaps it was never hers to tell,
with no one to tell it to.
And so it became this: The early
1930s and she was unmarried,
in nursing school,
her uniform an apron like a butcher’s,
long and white as at the bleached
beginning of day,
or a curtain drawn at the end.
The rest of her wasted behind it;
behind her the quickening,
her spine vulnerable as a sapling,
and as willful. Perhaps she was
trying to give it back
when she threw it down the hospital’s
elevator shaft, determined
to return somehow what
cannot be returned, the bell’s toll,
sworn oath, curse hurled into the eye of a well—
that hollow column,
dry oblivion catching the backward born.
Temporary madness was the diagnosis,
and with it, the kind
of forgiveness that must have been
its own damnation, severest mercy,
every other child
she bore its voice—that healthy a cry,
inconsolably so.
Copyright © 2025 by Kent Ippolito. Excerpted from Ungrafted (LSU Press). Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Claudia Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2005 poetry collection, Late Wife, and served as the poet laureate of Virginia. She was a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and frequently taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She died in 2014. Ungrafted includes previously uncollected poems left in manuscript at the time of her death, as well as selections from her eight published collections.
