Mara Adamitz Scrupe is an environmental installation artist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. She has received visual arts grants and fellowships and has won or been shortlisted for various international writing prizes. Her creative work often reflects on ideas of place-ness; her poems and essays evoke and explicate palpable experiences of land, landscapes, and the people, plants, and animals that inhabit them in extended rumination on migration and mobility, displacement and dynamism, voyaging and settling in. 

www.scrupe.com       www.lovelettertoleader.com

 

gone war 

 

in the night fires   

of illuminated faces 

uniforms       & dreamt sort  

 

of waked fracas

he saw an encampment        dun 

& sober-drunk          thrown 

 

in agitated 

hush           as sleeplessness sparked & 

queried all reason 

 

he pictured canvas 

tents carelessly pitched & aimed 

as combatants to   

 

a bare rifle blast   

as night planets        effulgent  

despite moonlight’s fired  

 

delivery in 

grief before the facts  & this 

pajamaed man   (not   

 

one for reverie) 

accepted he saw       gone war  

& newly fangled   

 

altogether birthed 

past to future in the shone  

eyes of innocence 

 

& he suspected 

the gist         of threat resurgent 

the drift of burning 

 

bitter haze   the reeking stench

of grudge & rancor   

at a distance   drawn

Koan

 

an unblocked heart holds the center – the muscle memories 

of body to blood vessels to ligaments & tendons 

to circulating fluids hydrating the brain         & I’m reminded 

again of a language of dichotomies: a koan (the Japanese word

koān  or a public matter for thought) is a paradoxical 

question a statement or a story meant to break a logical 

progression of thought or beliefs toward an answer 

or even a truth beyond reason              unanswerable

without a bond from the horde’s torso           to peripheries

Coronach

for Mary Eva (16 July 1894 – 2 February 1912)

 

i. I will be your profligate daughter    midwife/ rime-stippled 

pasture. I will take this wire & pull it 

taught              so that nothing  may cross or come between us. 

I will chase your prophesies               your haunts 

the deathless arguments from your lips. I will rob 

your hair & eyes         the colors textures of magpies 

or sheep or wild pigs snuffling at acorns or fallen 

before luminous heavenly bodies. Your corpses rustling 

in their graves.  I will be your ears past living. 

 

ii. I will be your conversations in three languages 

on the same page. Your burning disappointments 

your faiths 

the way they thrived & failed. 

I will drink      you you 

until we all all        fall off our chairs 

roaring at stupid jokes in dialects 

only the homesick will ever 

try & forget. I will beg & grovel & yield to you        

in seamed up stockings 

hot as a peat fire 

& poteen down your throat. 

Because you ask me.

 

iii. Penny-eyed blind & tongue-tied                

flannel for bedtime                 but not tonight. 

Caress me stroke me touch me           warm me

from forehead to rouge-tinged lips. 

My soot-black lashes. Just this once 

second born                 I am first. 

Let me listen for only a little while    

to low talk of neighborly news. Dewy wool 

& odor of winter mothballs.               Cedar balm 

& sudden salty sweat. Free a window or a door 

& let me fly (for heaven’s 

sake) in mother’s best & Nellie’s tatted dress.

I won’t keep long. 

 

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing 

through a circuit of soils, plants and animals. – Aldo Leopold

 

…And at the wakening of your first sleepe, You shall have a hot drink made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe, Your sorrows will have a slake… – from Old Robin of Portingale, a traditional English ballad

first sleep 

 

there is that sense        in other latitudes         in leaf fall

in cycles we take for granted 

that these are mysteries           or rather the natural 

order of things (the colder the preceding winter 

the earlier the unfurling) there are rules/ perhaps dawnings 

of both faith & calculation (there is that moment 

 

when the heavens relentlessly open up           pinked 

& beckoning) when youth bespoke eventually 

bellies up to the bar: who really gives a damn & pour me another 

there’s that vestigial wink of first sleep (always arriving 

in bitter chill when my days are gray 

& short enough           but long after

 

the turn of natal light) waking to sit fireside 

(my night divided – twained as male & female) 

& a child’s eyes blinked open             to nothing at all

out of the ordinary in a mother’s words

 

lye stil  

& I shalle come againe 

 

& there’s the second spell for sag & stumble (flopping 

on our pallets stuffed with straw & rags) & there are boundaries 

for setting (in my dreams        or rather as mirages that float 

between chapters of polyphasic sleep) & I ask 

for a story (twigs scrape the vellum 

at our windows) & it begins: in the warmest years our trees 

 

might fledge their tiny florets (their bark touching the fall moon’s 

weakest gleam) & there might be memory in the wood 

despite the muddle of frost’s forestalling (the warming) 

& still sometimes in forest ardor – in the heat of anticipation –

fresh growth buds swell in September & there’s no time

to harden         to toughen                   for winter’s comin

Gut

that the world carries on                     no matter 

& I consider the contents 

of a partially digested dinner: slightly burned porridge 

tinged with roundworms tapeworms whipworms 

 

& their eggs & I try to stand aside/ look away 

from the hammering clawing clinging

 – & I stop proselytizing 

preaching only to save myself – & I ask myself 

 

at sixteen if I were that girl (a thousand years 

gone) & I ate the whole meal 

before the hanging 

my gut churning up plants & pollens & proteins 

 

& I’m so poor & painful 

thin                  my scoliotic spine bent (knees 

to my chin)nat the end: a woolen band still tight 

around my throat         or if instead I picked them 

 

up playing in the dirt as my mother thought  

& she had the ready remedy fastened across 

my anus: a passel of tiny white writhing threads 

stuck                to Scotch Tape