Break
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Of the estimated 10,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes region, only about 350 of them
are located in Lake Superior. Of those, about 50 wrecks are presumed to be within
Minnesota waters. – Minnesota Historical Society
crystalline droplets spangled & paned
mince & slide & eliding skim a lock a pool a sluice
a pond even as winter turns spring
whether in admiration – sans embarrassment at its own
superfluidity/ avidity – my James takes its leave
all the way river to sea (once colonists washed up on shore
& called it paradise) or conversely in prehensive delight
a forest wraps its roots/ one around another – & well below
feeding/ nursing mutation’s not a worry
in this system where every grown up fosters a sapling a seedling –
but by the same token a lake leaves by another riverine
waterway in open-handed outlet: a body unbolted
unbarred – in my mind’s eye I see it now that cabin
on sand-bottomed Sugar Lake – the pump in the kitchen
the back-of-the-bike ride up there in summer
& in winter in the front room we warmed our rear ends
at the oil stove set square on a metal fire mat – or otherwise
in my mind’s eye traveling westward
(some twelve-hundred miles) to the Great Salt Lake (solid saline
flats will gain ground science says
& dry these waters in five years’ time)
from desert measure in eternal buffet in out-of-this-world amplitude
I stand amid thirty thousand acres of white wondering
at my own smallness – starry salt stretched out – looking up
my body circumscribed/ evaporating (& no natural
portage) but truly nothing compares with this northern Great
Lake’s lava-banked brawn & in my mind’s eye looking out
I see break & wreckage – all hands gone down in monstrous
free-for-all wave-lashed inland storms –
I watch sea-drift wash ashore & there I stand silent
imagining (year in & year out) the waters
of our bodies dissolving – as of ionic salt –
in their own alkalescency & still
once the warm times came meltwater flowed beryl
in troughs & valleys filled with soil & stones
& boulders
formed dams/ making even more new sloughs
& I’m thinking (years on) of that summer
of breakdown (my five-year marriage gone & grieved
by the shore of a bowl-shaped basin carved eighteen millennia
ago this greatest in the world inland ocean gouged
by mile-thick ice sleds sliding shouldering
scrubbing sundering
Mara Adamitz Scrupe
Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a poet and writer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Her publications include five full poetry collections, and she has selections in generational anthologies by Southword/ Munster Literature, Aesthetica, Stony Thursday, and 64 Best Poets/ Black Mountain Press, and poems in key UK and US journals including Radar, Rhino, Tupelo, Cincinnati Review, The London Magazine, Mslexia, Magma, Abridged, and The Poetry Business/ Smith Doorstop. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, she has won or been shortlisted for significant literary awards including Arts University Bournemouth International Poetry Prize, Magma Pamphlet Publication Award, Gregory O’Donohugh International Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and National Poetry Society UK. Mara is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and she serves as Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts Philadelphia. She resides with her husband on their farm in the Blue Ridge Piedmont countryside of Virginia.