Driftless
Diane Scholl
Autumn run-off finds a way
down steep algific slopes
to sift through layers of silt,
before
it hits the limestone bedrock
head on, freezing over winter,
where fossils dream of lost exotic seas.
Crustaceans and cephalopods
grow crusty
in their buried life,
their forms and colors once
a magic show of water, air, and light.
In spring and summer,
earth exhales
its prehistoric breath
from crevices and breaks,
rife with the leaf mold
of its secret heritage,
cool to the skin,
its vivid memory stirred awake.
Bloodroot, wild ginger, rue anemone
mark the trail I walk.
I come
because I’ve lost my heart,
and lose it now again
to this old teeming world
I’m part of,
tossed about,
resurfacing, like creatures swimming
in their tidal pools,
both rare and ordinary after all,
so much
alive today, so intricately small.
About the Author
Diane Scholl is professor emerita of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she taught American and modern British literature, poetry courses, and literature by women. Her poems have been published in Cider Press Review, Louisville Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Ruminate, and Prime Number Magazine, among other places. In 2019 her chapbook, Salt, was published by Seven Kitchens Press; the same press published her second chapbook, Shipbuilding, winner of the 2023 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Contest, in 2025. She is presently working on a longer collection of poems, called Skylight. A native of Brooklyn, NY, she misses the tree-lined streets and multi-cultural neighborhoods of home, but has learned to love the limestone bluffs of NE Iowa.