Collecte Works by Lorine Niedecker Page A

went along
                   Chomei
    Dante
         and the Persian
                  Firdusi—
    rigging
          for his own
                   singing
     

     
    Wilderness
    You are the man
    You are my other country
    and I find it hard going
    You are the prickly pear
    You are the sudden violent storm
    the torrent to raise the river
    to float the wounded doe
     

     
    Consider
    the alliance—
    ships and plants
    The take-for-granted bloom
    of our roadsides
               Queen Anne's Lace
               Black Eyed Susans
                                rode the sea
    “Specimens graciously passed
    between warring fleets”
    And when an old boat rots ashore
    itself once living plant
                                 it sprouts.
     

     
    Otherwise
    Gerard Manley Hopkins
    Dear friend: If the poem
    is printed few
    will read and fewer scan it
    much less understand it
    To be sure
    the scanning's plain
    but who will veer
    from the usual stamp and pound
    Other work?—I've not yet found
    the oak leaves' law…
     
     

     
    Nursery Rhyme
    As I nurse my pump
    The greatest plumber
          in all the town
    from Montgomery Ward
    rode a Cadillac carriage
              by marriage
    and visited my pump
    A sensitive pump
               said he
    that has at times a proper
              balance
           of water, air
    and poetry
     
     

     
    Three Americans
    John Adams is our man
    but delicate beauty
    touched the other one—
    an architect
    and a woman artist
    walked beside Jefferson
    Abigail
    (Long face horse-name)
    cheesemaker
    chicken raiser
    wrote letters that John
    and TJ could savour
     
     

     
    POEMS AT THE PORTHOLE
    Blue and white
    china cups
    glacier-adjacent
    lost
    in the foothills
     

     
     
    The soil is poor
    water scarce
          the people clothed
                  in wind and cold—
    Bolivia
     

     
    Michelangelo
    If matches had been my work
    instead of marble poems
                —sulphur—
         I'd suffer
    less
     
     

     
    Wallace Stevens
    What you say about the early
    yellow springtime is also something
    worth sticking to
     

     
    SUBLIMINAL
                Sleep's dream
    the nerve-flash in the blood
                The sense
    of what's seen
                 “I took cold
    on my nerves”—my mother
               tall, tormented
    darkinfested
     

     
    Waded, watched, warbled
    learned to write on slate
    with chalk from an ancient sea
    If I could float my tentacles
    through the deep…
    pulsate an invisible glow
     

     
    Illustrated night clock's
              constellations
    and the booming
                             star-ticks
    Soon I rise
             to give the universe
                            my flicks
     

     
    Honest
              Solid
                      The lip
       of tipped
    lily
    A quiet flock
              of words
                       not the hound-
         howl
    holed
     

     
    Night
            the sag
                      of day
    My mother
           all the years
                    no day
     

     
    LZ
    He walked—loped—the bridge
    Saluted Peck Slip
    —his friend shipped fish—
                 My dish
    Test
    and the short verse
    Now he stops for lilacs
    —in the sun's fame
                  he'd say—
    Stops?
    Even for death
                   Z
    after all that “A”
    would dip his wool beret
    to carp-fed roots
     

     
    Peace
    Dark road home
                from town—
    young neighbor as he walked
        wound up tiny Swiss works—
                    a firefly music
    Mickey Mouse leaned on a bubble
                 removed a tear
    from the elephant's