Diane Scholl | Shipbuilding

Shipbuilding: poems by Diane Scholl. Number 23 in our Rane Arroyo Series.

[ cover image: Alfred Godchaux, Schiffswerft, oil on canvas, ca. 1895 ]

Publication:  May 30, 2025 [100 copies]
29 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-25-9
$ 12.00

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, Ruminate, The Louisville Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among other places. Her first chapbook, Salt, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2019. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she misses the tree-lined streets and multicultural neighborhoods of home, but has learned to love the  scenic bluffs of NE Iowa.

Burial Ship, 1880

The silk tapestry’s so fine it melts in air
when the grave mound’s breached,
blue clay hollowed out like a womb. Inside
the ship’s curved ribs of oak and willow
wands the warrior won’t go raiding
on the stormy seas of slate, both sword
and scabbard gone, grave goods plundered.
 
Meanwhile love thrums in the veins
of my great-grandmother on the farm,
her teeth’s isotopes shaped from its soil.
At summer’s end she’ll marry, the year
of the excavation. She’s already borne
another man’s child; her bridegroom,
a stranger here, is maybe surprised she’s
chosen him. He’s tender when he takes
her hand. Quickening with desire,
they’ll walk together evenings, speaking
softly of the gaming board and pieces of horn,
a fragment of wool sail in red and white.

They’ll lean over to see the brainpan
and eye sockets, rudder and rigging,
slim gold threads, emerge from the peat,
a prow shapely as her body, sleek like
a seal’s skin, fitted to breast the waves. 

But the past falls away from them, dries
and stales. With a catch of the heart,
they’ll turn to each other again.

[ Thanks to the editors of Spoon River Poetry Review for first publishing this poem ]
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