Cartographic Ekphrasis
US Geological Survey, Iowa-Wisconsin-Waukon Quadrangle, 1903
topography line moss slime mold crawl advances &
retreats just shy of glacier edge scrape neighbor
creek run river run goose bump woodgrain rise
fingerprint whorls hill ribs river spine cities on the flood
plain land lake surface pulse course of flood & rain
how many electric grid dirt road frames have, had, will be
tilled under how many mouths fed how many species
starved how many monocrops trademarked out
of the hands of the farmers, the harvesters, the
wind how many creek cheek lines runoff soaked
marbled in burn culverts run parched to the west they
say it would take another ice age to redo what some
humans have done to the land in the past sixty years. I
don’t know how to imagine the place my grandmother
was briefly born in the lower right map quadrant just
west of the river column Americanic divide from here
the land looks like wind & renaming one kind of
sensemaking tacked & plotted over the ongoing earth’s
lungwork motions.
Narthex
I am treading water
in a fen
off a vetch road off a microhighway
between corn & river in Iowa
The air gnat thick
I am sure there are 100 gleeful ticks
all over me Yellowthroat, blackbird, wren
yellow stargrass fill the rippling
acreage beyond the margin
of evenly spaced seedlings, gravel, drainage
I am trusting two Iowans who know
something of groundwater and tallgrass to lead me
We follow one after the other into the narthex
the zone of restoration
The earth jellies
sedge & thistle to the shins grasses to the ribs
bulrushes over head We process
towards the oldest remnant the sacred
Water burbles up streams eternal
earth fed, seeping back into itself
Soil slip gaps
go as far down
as down can go
We walk on water
into the resilient ancient
suspended by 12,000 years
of plant birth & decay
swallowed garter snake skins
embalmed leopard frogs
bison bones
unbloomed seeds of centuries We genuflect
knees suckered in to fen pulse
Crypt echoes up undersongs
that settle briefly into my inner chambers
buttress of rib dangling
above belly soft
the marrow sloshing
within the bone.
Prairie Proprioception
Sometimes while out driving I am struck
into thinking damn, I’m in the middle of a continent
& every wrap around horizon tells me so too.
First time I walked out between corn rows
in winter I thought I was drowning.
Full flatness an illusion—a slight depression
& furrows all around could swallow up
one whose direction was trained by hills.
The sky touches down here so well
brings me new wonders
to any alley or gravel road
or field margin: nightjars, harvest
moons, bursts of borealis, partial eclipses
a twenty minute commute to the Milky Way
white pelicans that dissolve
into the bulk of water suspended
in cloud streaming faster
than any river
how to tell a bat from swift in dusk silhouette
green proto-tornado hues, squall lines
white outs, pinkest and broodiest cumulous
weight of small talk about the weather
understanding of the upper
windshield wiper settings on my car.
Mountains are one way to get closer
to the heavens—there you go to brush the sky
here you get consumed
beyond every visible edge the sky licks
up pockets of bluestem, low creeks
stands of oaks, brick lined main streets, a hundred
splendid porches with a hundred splendid cats, bison wallows—
It’s constant, the miraculous
it’s endless, the mundane.
CLAIRE JUSSEL is a poet and artist from Boise, Idaho, who spent the last decade in a slow burn love affair with the Midwest. Her previous places of work and fascination have included bookselling at Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, park-rangering in Wyoming, and occasional lighthouse keeping. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University and a BA in History and English from St. Olaf College. Her poems have appeared in WFAN’s zine Stories of the Seasons, SEISMA, Pinhole Poetry, Wizards in Space, Split Rock Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and West Trade Review.
