On Rembrandt’s Isaac and Rebecca

by Mara Adamitz Scrupe

I might have mentioned something classical
about myths & magic. I might have talked
of famous warriors crossing the Rubicon
or goddesses or even saints. (& no one else in my real life
would have known what it meant.)

I might have rummaged around in my underwear drawer
(I kept the black lace panties
slit open at the crotch with the coral pink bow
you were mad for). In so wet a country (with dust
rising in the drought time) this is another

dream you once told me. That brilliance shown
in the middle of your pictures. That colors swirled
& bled (I see now how silken pigments & viscid oils
seduced you like murder & lust drew you
to the killing hand).

I might have trusted you reckoned you a king a priori
(on my faith alone) believed (on my knees) in you
as genuflection is to the treasure
of certainty as nave to sanctuary
as the axis the cross is to my body’s

chapel. I might have hidden my tenderness
condensed the truth to hankering/ an itch
or a weakness. Concealed (we looked like brother & sister)
there was only that single pearl (your fingertips
searched pressing) in our rush to pleasure.

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, writer, documentary filmmaker and the recipient of divers creative grants and fellowships. Her cross-disciplinary creative practice explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with nature; her installations, artist books, sculptures, drawings, poems, and essays investigate how we as thinking animals are shaped and changed – emotionally, socially, politically, and spiritually – by our interdependencies with the natural world. Correlatively, Mara’s writing reflects on ideas of place-ness; her poems evoke palpable experiences of land, landscapes, plants and animals in extended ruminations on migration and mobility, displacement and dynamism, voyaging and settling in. Mara is the author of seven prizewinning poetry collections, and she has won or been shortlisted for international writing prizes including National Poetry Society Competition (UK) and Aesthetica Poetry Prize (UK). She serves as Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Mara lives with her husband on their farm bordering the James River in Virginia. www.scrupe.com www.lovelettertoleader.com