it might be a snake or maybe a dragon curling itself
inside a carved jamb or lintel – & on top the most beautiful
of bird’s palmated feet clasping the fat curve
of sinewy body – but instead it’s a ditch shovel
or a flat end grain shovel
husky mouthed for scoop & lift
see if I can boost it full & throw the snows
of all my childhood winters or a pointed end
tree shovel for setting in those twenty sugar maples
shady umbrellaed
cooling us in the stewyist summers or a posthole
digger for planting a fence we thought would never rot
being cedar long gone now
or a rubber-handled aluminum trowel or my trusty
garden spade/ serviceable for every kind of cultivation
faithful dependable while a human

-headed lion crouches beneath a serpent’s whorl
– each scale clean etched to near perfection –
pales beside the real-life rat snake right now raked
full length in muscular stricture/ dorsals unkeeled/ ridgeless
& shining gripped smooth against our newly graveled
walk & maybe that stonework relief from
the southern Marches – from the medieval plural marca
for march or mark means a border zone
in between between

the Italy I’ve never liked – I’m always most miserable
in ambient happiness or maybe I’m just not cut out
for joie de vivre or queuing in endless serpentines
to sort-of-see something of antiquity & frankly I don’t feel
real-life saved in Mother Earth’s enfolding
arms in the face of every common cruelty
my scoop shovel dredging up that snake/ moving it
away from no more proof needed than a poor
fallen fledgling grackle trying for flight
yellow beak agape

cradled in my palm/ urgent for feeding I poke tiny
gobs of mashed cat food from the tip
of a chopstick into its screaming beak/ carry it
snug in a box lined with leaves maybe
I’ll try raising it safe on my porch – that homely sweet
crying creature – but after all return it
to the ground where I found it
to its whistling parents’ chittered reproof
still in harm’s way

Mara Adamitz Scrupe

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