Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Lesser & More

& the steppe grass switched & spoke             as contrariwise

            on a disparate continent Persian candies tasted

of hibiscus & smelt of jasmine           – but no          never mind

we were           then                 so very far

            from                there –

still & all around that time the smallest sparrows

            wintered at the bottoms of glacial lakes

            & the littlest ice age of our Americas

ushered in an era where everything was lesser           yet

we sowed & harvested                        & our settlements

            found alliance despite our ambitions

but still further back during that last maximum

            Pleistocene                  & yes despite

that very glacial sheet – bear in mind this was twenty

thousand years ago & our humanness had not yet

            become                        not                   become

because in glaciation              we’d come so close                 so close

& though that peppering of loamy woodland floors

            meant poison for us                Box Turtle craved

Mayapple’s ripening/ nibbling beneath her numberless

umbrellas but most of all he relished her seeds of tropical savor

            which passing through his gut

germinated/ encouraging/ expanding/ diversifying

– yes for his own good                        still & all

enlightened self-interest often serves a larger purpose –

these flowering fruiting colonies he so fancied

– & by the way it is said the oldest communities

span a hundred years & more –                      still

            unlike most common turtles

in fear & anxiety he could clamp his shell shut

            – just like a box –                    secure from such

as carnivorous raccoons & opossums

his hinged-belly sanctuary a personal portmanteau

            so tightly sealed against threat

even an ant mightn’t enter –               still & all

two old friends & longtime neighbors

– one herbaceous        the other chelonian –

forge safe bonds of protection & sustenance

– one always there for the other despite their differences – 

in their deepest dependencies

in a college of ancient inventions

                                                            a hot dry span

emerges           (for instance)               as anachronism 

or in Constable’s Study in cloud knots expanding & contracting

as curled ice crystals/ as cirrus calligraphy

absconding with the fair         while foul – in warning

or menace of forever storm – hangs in a stop-motion

sky       or instead as gusts/ resistances           something like

a tragically bucketed trebuchet hurls              & hurling

or no                better yet          as a consequence of solid brass

balls at the top of a tall tin box           released

(on their way down) striking a series of steps & eventually

crashing into a loose metal sheet                    thus announcing

the entrances & exits of thespian gods & goddesses

resonating loud & low in an ancient Alexandrian

thunder-making machine         & yes              that’s exactly

right on a warm & humid morning altocumuli might signal

a warning as in Bierstadt’s Puget Sound or (backed

by walled cumulonimbi) in van Ruisdael’s Windmill

threatening a coming thunderstorm (imagine that sense

of loudness on canvas) as three small still female figures

 – their features obscured by Dutch bonnets – look out to sea

or sometime even further back           a procession of women

walking & crying into tiny cups – into

spindly necked bulbed flasks              into solid liquid iridescent

blue-green phials of sand & potash & soda & lime               held

at tear ducts’ brim – weeps immoderately unlike me

in my northerner’s resistance to grief

my embarrassment at emotion           & yet the moon tugs

at the lining of my skin requiring commanding avowing

the lacrymatoria of those who cried behind the beat of a relic

drum (perhaps it was a bodhrán’s lament       curiously

the word in Irish means          deaf) & it strikes me strange

that so somber a sound accompanying any céilí

could cue those mourners paid most profitably for excessive

sorrowing (the more anguish the better memorialized) & yes

there are beginnings as well as endings in scoured tombs &

shivery cups left behind with the dead to catch their tears  

(any expression may be linear – in times       in sequences)

& still I wonder about sublimity & decline                greatness

& insignificance: the gist of Friedrich’s Wanderer staring

either in joy or terror (I can’t say which) into a fogged abyss & still

I look for my father                 born ninety-six years ago today

in the cloudless heavens of a perfect morning           & I remember

myself seven decades later/ bedside (I wasn’t) on a starry

moonlit night (in fact it wasn’t) looking up at stratus or cumulus

– I don’t know which –           to the overcast opening (in real life

it rained an inch & a half)                   as he tossed

& sobbed & fought                 & he thought he saw his mother

in the morphine glazed confabulation of his deathbed