A Pocket Guide to Caving Grounds
By Kathleen M. Heideman
Aeons and aeons of rock.
They are too tongueless to tell
the gist of their long endurance.
— Diane Sautter, “Lake Superior Deva”
According to cartographers, anything we can
spatially imagine may be mapped, even places we
will never go, the Moon, the Milky Way, imaginary places
such as purgatory, mind-maps, Territory of Love,
water-filled shafts under Main Street —
⚒
Or say Negaunee’s unpredictable body is muscled here,
fat there, a random whorling between these extremes,
dots to mark where she was undermined by generations,
dots for softness, for grandfathers-fathers-sons,
dots to mark cemeteries, bodies never found,
dots to mark spots where her ruined features
spell Braille warnings: caving grounds, mappable
. ::....
.. ...... :: ........ ...... ........ ......... .... ........ ... ..... ...... .. ..
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.. ....... ..... ........ ...::. .....::. ..... .....::. :.. ...
dots on the map say overburden
turning back where bedrock veins
writhe black along Teal Lake’s far pink flank,
impenetrable, adjusting her surfaces to fit the varying
delineations of low-lands, orebodies, bluff-curves —
granular patterns
materializing as the out-of-town granddaughter
takes a careful grave-rubbing from leaning slabs,
simple markers for hard lives half-remembered;
She is whatever you track
into the house, a gritty woman common as dirt —
whatever grips the tread of your sole
or catches in the neck folds of a sleeping body,
moist whetstone for your mother’s pain,
sharpening each feature the map legend promises
swamps and hills and more: virginstone,
motherlode, rockfaces south of town
where the county roadcrew blew a four-lane hole
through her hardened heart, her outcrop —
her face Precambrian, Archaean, Banded Iron Formation,
a mottled 55-mph blur of pink and blue-gray
defaced by the naïve arithmetic of u+me4ever —
specularite, cornerstone,
the Miners Bank reborn as Union Headquarters,
sandstone whose eroding surface reveals vines, distant artisan’s hand.
She is your inner landscape populated by minutia:
whatever shape lichen takes
colonizing a monument, whatever turns the lake water green
or grows in rain-rinsed crevices, whatever mosses homestead
the lips of abandoned shafts
⚒
whatever miniature sedge
or columbine struggle-blossoms on a high ledge,
whatever form she takes she is your mother’s mother
name-lines set in limestone,
a memorial of banded jaspelite and specularite,
the birth and deathlines of her, each etched headstone letter
grown thin on a diet of winter weather —
she is ironwork, ruined forge, iron bluffs flowering on topo maps
\ \ | | / /
> <
/ / | | \ \
ruined castle towers of stone guarding weariness —
she is the mine-town shuddering daily
at a quarter-past, internal clockwork, subterranean
blasts from which structures reverberate but go on standing,
swayed turret-stone in the defense of her own nature, strong —
say she is iron mixed with bentonite mixed with lime —
pelletized and improved-upon for industry’s sake,
taconite face a woman applies to hide softer thoughts —
birthstone, crystallized, born in voids
her bones are limestone, dolomite, headstone, rubblestone,
Miner’s last cave-in, Mud-in-your-eye
The Only Lawn a Man Need Never Mow,
Oracle stone, sandy meadow strewn with angels, dates, lichens,
ivy, plastic mums, raw spots where the earth
was so recently disturbed —
+ + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++ + +
+ + ++ + + + + + + + + + ++ + ++ + + + + +
+ + + +
According to the map, she’s the last turn
at the end of a long dirt road, dead end,
Lodestone Motel — Madame Geologie, Proprietress
a democratic resting place for laborers
and laggards alike, all requests for lake-view suites honored,
offering hard beds for the faithful
and hard beds for adulterers, all wages equal
under her gravel-roofed graves.
Kathleen M. Heideman is the author of Psalms of the Early Anthropocene (Winter Cabin Books, 2017). Based in Michigan's wild Upper Peninsula, she has completed artist residencies with the National Park Service, watersheds, scientific research stations, private foundations, and the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists & Writers Program. Curious woman.