Poetry – Julia Bouwsma

In this edition of the Maine Arts Journal, we are celebrating our two most recent Poets Laureate. Julia Bouwsma is the outgoing laureate, and Dawn Potter is the incoming one. Both of these stunning poets have a strong attachment to the land and to Maine. Both have lived on and with the land. Julia’s poems represented here are from her most recent book, Death Fluorescence. In “After We Wound the Land to Maps,” she explores the complexity of human impact on the land, mapping what we have built and let fall to ruin, and how the land in all its particularity has responded. A map is an abstraction, an objectification of the land, and in that way a wound. But the poem also suggests there’s a symbiosis between the wounded and the ones who wound. After giving us the history of the particular piece of land that is now hers, she says, “And now I am here, an unwanted steward, unneeded witness.”

In “Point of Origin,” there is another kind of mapping as the poet tries to fill in the missing routes of her ancestors, paths that have been erased by violence and the long history of migration. “The ones who know now dead and gone, the documents scattered and opaque,” and yet their presence is as real to her as the fish she knows swim under the frozen pond.

Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), as well as the librettist for a short chamber opera project, Ghost Apples (2025). Bouwsma’s honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards.

—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor

 

 

After We Wound the Land to Maps

 

Better stewardship than ownership, but this wooded hill has never

needed anyone. Without us, it stretched its green flanks feral

until blackberry canes cracked under their own weight, deer tramped

switchback tunnels through the undergrowth, columbine erupted

purple and pink-white beneath sugar maples. Without us, the hill’s

scars turned porous: August aster bottlebrushed from cellar holes,

a stand of ash rose from a single stump, snakes studded

themselves into the splicing silences of the stone walls and slept.

Without us, the stories grew moss and sprouted saplings

like an erratic boulder from its hulking granite back. And likely

the hill preferred this, for it never needed us here to hear or tell

of the seven-sided pole barn filled with its seven years of trash,

of the baby diapers and propane tanks that shot shrapnel

when the man before us set it ablaze. Nor did it need the story

of the DEA helicopter sent to arrest the man before him, man

of shotgun and wild rumors, of holes all over the front lawn

where the pot plants grew and where we still now sometimes stumble

carrying our buckets. No, the land didn’t need the herd of cows

before him either, or the family they belonged to, the ones who built

this rotting cabin, who dug septic and well and then one day just up

and disappeared. Though that woman came back once, in a dusty white

minivan driven by her daughter, came to see one last time her lost

home and told me—through plastic oxygen tubes from the car window—

of a time when this whole hillside rolled with wheat, sheep, fields

and the hubris of a farmer who scrambled to gather his hay as thunderclouds

bore down upon him, how once the last bale was in, he shook his fist

at the sky in triumph and the sky replied a pitchfork of lightning

right into the roof of his barn. So fire. So all those fields regrew to woods.

So new scrub for the partridge. So no trace of the now-vanished schoolhouse,

nothing left of the sawmill but a clogged stone dam and a swamp

of dank leaves. Just the headstones remain: mildew and algae on marble,

children buried before their parents. Just the rusted gate, the tree-bent

chain link. The rest left home at first opportunity, drawn by the heady

violence of opportunity, abandoned this hill to a new violence of boundary

pins and parceling out. And now I am here, an unwanted steward, unneeded

witness. I am here, and this topography has made a debt of me. The debt

began before we ever arrived. Perhaps the debt began when someone

followed a deer through the woods on the way to the river. Or perhaps

when the mountains first churned with glacial debris. Certainly the debt

began when someone wrote their name on a property map, a deed.

And by the time we arrived, adolescent on the solipsistic romance

of our own manifest destiny, believing we could make our own end,

glowing from the flickering light of flame-colored leaves, we already knew:

the wound was us. It lodged in our throats, it grew under our tongues—

moss to a slope, lily of the valley to a grave—until we could no longer

discern the green of the hill from the skin of our hands. Each spring

weeps its spring runoff , sugars the trees with tears, but the wound

remains. The wound festers violet and lilac; it swells a bloat-pond

of summer warbling; it lacerates a hot fist of fall color with the urgency

of an extinction burst, and yet the land lumbers on—its low dirge of survival

and pine pitch stitching us—lichen to lesion, light to ligament, rock to rib.

 

 

Point of Origin

 

Discussing the problem of origins with my mother on the telephone

again, I watch the frozen lake extend beneath the windowpanes.

A frozen lake recalls blank poster board as in grade school—half the family tree

wizened white after I came home asking nationalities, countries of origin

and my mother said, Just put Jewish and I said, Jewish is not a country

so she tried to tell me what she knew, which amounted to something like snow

falling in a forest that spanned all the way from Austria to Lithuania or Estonia

or Russia, a forest marked by sudden uneven clearings called fields where

bodies might be found, a dark forest pocked by villages no one wanted

to remember the names of so they forgot them or in any event forgot to tell

their children as perhaps they forgot even their own names, stilled and severed

until it became impossible to trace: one name found on a ship’s manifest, another

claimed at entry, a stranger inside a familiar, a matryoshka we don’t speak of until

it’s too late, the ones who know now dead and gone, the documents scattered

and opaque. On the phone my mother speaks of research, suggests a distant relative

who might know more, but like the crusted snow that coats this lake, erasure

has become a skin. Inside me an expanse of ice extends and below that ice

a fish swims slow and dark, scaling figure eights between the stones. In winter

a lake transforms to field. Between pickup trucks and fishing shacks, a lone figure

paces. I cannot see the fish, and yet I know it’s there, beneath this makeshift ground.