Letter from Shuyak Island, Alaska
by Helena Minton
To my grandmother
I liked to sit at your dressing table.
Whiskey-colored perfumes smelled of dust.
The photograph beside the mirror showed
a serious face, a man in pince-nez
who died the year I was born.
Nights, lying on the fold-out couch,
I was surrounded: mahogany, Chinese lamps,
and paintings of forests
boxed in by big gold frames.
Nature felt confining,
closing in as you grew old.
This summer I sleep on a barge,
stare at spruce and sky
as I walk on this island which hasn’t changed
since our Celtic ancestors invaded Ireland.
1909 you were twenty-two
I picture you in Boston
practicing piano scales
the day Mount Augustine—the volcano
I see from the beach—spilled lava into the sea.
Perhaps you saw it in the paper, perhaps
not, concerned with music or men or money,
gold-rimmed plates and goblets of your future.
If you thought of any other world
it was Europe, Strauss waltzes,
a honeymoon tour before the war.
PHOTO: The 2006 eruption of Augustine Volcano, which forms Augustine Island in south central coastal Alaska, 174 miles southwest of Anchorage. Photo by Cyrus Read Geophysicist USGS, Alaska Volcano Observatory.
POETRY and PLACES 