Pearl Osten worked until after midnight, Oct. 2, 1927, in an Eighth street tea room,
where she eked out a wage which helped to pay for her schooling. She took a street car
to the home of relatives with whom she was staying … There the trail ends.
– Minneapolis Star, May 24, 1930

Pearl

on that new broke land           I don’t anymore
recall               there may have been a tree line or a hedgerow
a grove named & a bird’s sternum
a stem & a leaf stalk sparkling with the star-spattered
hairs of a scarce clustered poppy in blood carmine redness
though perhaps not native       rather planted or escaped
some settler’s garden/ a natural
migrant or not – I could have made a simple move
from cloistered pearl –
my bodice of flowers hand-tatted lace mizzling
my throat & with my stranger’s accent (I was a child
grown up with folk from another place) I could have called
out my crisis but for the background
the measure that caught me                descendant
seeking                        coursing/ stalking
as the wail of a red-shouldered hawk

//

it’s late            he said             I’ll see you to your door
as we headed out from my shift          a way-past-midnight-moon
spangling as speechless witness/ mimetic (almost)
of morning coming                 & our shadows coursed
rolling as changelings             mine floated – glittering
in my gypsy server’s costume stepping up
to the streetcar platform – & my gallant
my admirer     my knight touched my arm     then held         –

//

& though Hildegard’s theory of viriditas (associating greenness
with fecundity & the womb of the female body) warns us
of the counterbalance of verdancy
with the violence of male sexuality quickening all things
to life               still daughters will leave home           for more
& music & mothers will weep            for losing

//

& I looked up & saw the night sky sequined
& looking down I saw faults & natural basins filled
with rainfall & streams flowing clear
as waters of Olaf Lake lapping at my ankles
& then I swam/ swimming
for home         for the farm                 & it’s not news
that human intention is changeable I know that
now/ the way             it works/ hunter           & prey

//

it’s two hundred miles as the crow flies from Minneapolis
to Norwegian Grove               & mine so brief lifetime
what                just twenty years & I watch the animals
how elegantly they walk as though they own
this world & I wish for the melodies I only studied
but never made
(the metronome of a mantle clock our homestead’s
only timepiece
& I can smell rosemary in the garden or maybe it’s Mama’s
dill & every day in June I brush past velvety purple plumes
of prairie turnips in our fields             & I hope
they still grow & flourish       where once
they thrived            in Minnesota in my time

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is an environmental installation artist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. 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. http://www.scrupe.com