TRAGIC Poem: Pearl’s rarity in such a lifetime, by Mara Adamitz Scrupe

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’s rarity in such a lifetime
on that new broke land I don’t anymore recall there may
have been tree line or 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 from 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 & 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
& in such a lifetime brief/ what but twenty years & just 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 – there are seven here/ collected / lined up
above your fireplace) & I can still 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