something close to a cloud/ cast a perfect billow
old school spelled out in silver nitrate over sodium
chloride on coated paper of a rugged shoreline eroding
from continental glaciers advancing retreating
akin to looking at time & space as an archaeologist’s
tendering/ a mountain dulled of purpose/ wounded splinted
& worn away – but not wasted – in something like
a slow drama of midwinter madness or any geologist’s
descriptor: an isolate ridge of erosion-resistant rock
rising above the peneplain taken/ shaken/ pulled

up by the scruff of its neck & still
emerging in faceted semi-precious chimera
as purpled crystal refectory/ a colossal quartz
wrestler inhumed & struggling in an earthly half -
nelson hold a tempered veteran weathering
but not insofar as spiritual essence in clarity
healing & protection though behindhand
men’s & machinery’s cutting ways take trees & topsoil
& this faceted giant/ radically reduced – its profile
flattened from castle to cellar in the drilling burrowing

pitting quarrying – wonders at its own endurance/ grieves
its stolen gemstone riches in blues & greens & rosy
ochre meanwhile waging war on whiteflies
laying their eggs on my cilantro & basil & Swiss chard
I interrupt this reverie to contemplate the living & the so
-called dead – a boulder has no cells & therefore can’t
be sentient so science says & hogs wallow in mud
to warm themselves so said my Granddad – a farmer
who knew a thing or two about the quick & the cold –
& lately rummaging through slidey stacks

of family photographs in cardboard cartons I
mull residues/ the what of recording in shadowy gelatin
& light sensitive salts strangers in the negative
on scratched plastic – once a gold standard of evidence
now a curious anachronism – & I weigh valuations
of kyanite mined for soon obsolete electronics
while a monadnock’s stone somehow perseveres
– flawed & included – as phantom neck
& arm & shoulder carried high in spectral altitudes
of greed dissolution & mountainous grief

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

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