AT HIGH FALLS, MINNESOTA

by Maxine Susman

 

I look across the gorge to Ontario—

same wilderness on the other side.

The great Falls plunge, three separate chutes,

over the bowl of ragged basalt cliffs

into the river flowing to Lake Superior.

Pounding roar, wall of spray, impassible—

here the voyageurs, bearing on their backs

more than their weight in beaver pelts,

slung their birch canoes onto their shoulders

and made le grand portage.

 

Wilderness ranges along the gorge

farther than the eye can travel.

United States / Canada / Gichi Onigamiig,

The narrow bed of Pigeon River

now the border between nations

that share the same terrain:

Falls, thick forest, gray cliffs of diabase.

I could almost hurl a rock across—

it would reach another country,

shared bedrock of Laurentian Shield.

 

Wilderness joins both sides together.

My father / myself,

his native land / and mine,

his parents' native land / and his,

our family river flowing over borders

from Belarus to Montreal,

from Ontario to New York.

I won't cross through Customs this time,

I'm close enough to know my father's laugh

inside the space inside the water

same on both sides of the Falls

my father's homeland a stone's throw away.

Maxine Susman, Highland Park, NJ, has published six chapbooks and two full-length books of poetry, most recently Northern Swim (Ragged Sky Press, 2024). Her work concerns the environment and natural world, history, art, people and other creatures. She has been leading poetry workshops for many years and she teaches poetry-writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award. A Ginsberg Award finalist and multiple Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in dozens of publications including Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Canary, Blueline, Slant, Earth’s Daughters, and Crab Orchard Review.

BLINK

by Maxine Susman

Fireflies may disappear, so NY scientists are trying to count how many are left. —The Gothamist, August 22, 2023

They don’t light the lawn as they used to.

They don’t light up my brain.

As a kid I’d cup my hands into a lantern

and catch a dozen or more at a time,

they were so tame they glowed through my fingers,

lit my hands and then the jar I filled with them, 

the dotted love songs of bugs—

then I’d set them free to speckle the summer grass. 

 

Remember on the mountain how fireflies rose

high as the trees, spread a yellow Milky Way—

and the meadow we named Fireflyworks Hill 

where fireflies at dusk outnumbered wildflowers.     

Remember when they arrived each year to kindle 

our brains, they’d set our neurons firing, 

rising like wishes through the summer doldrums.

 

This year as each year their numbers dwindle. 

I see one or two flittering solitary, 

no one to answer, 

to answer to, 

be lit for. 

Maxine Susman, from central New Jersey, has published seven poetry collections, with poems in journals such as Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Earth’s Daughters, Crab Orchard Review, Slant, and Canary. She teaches poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University.