Authors: Lorine Niedecker
on my little river.
Black as those beside Troy,
but sailless tar-preserve-black fish barges
and orange and Chinese-red rowboats
in which the three virtues
knowledge, humanity, energy
Sometimes ride.
All children begin with the life of the mind—
if there were no marsh or stream
imagine it
99 children go into business
selling angleworms,
the hundredth develops free fingers in John Sebastian Brook.
“Paul's playing ‘Handle.’
His eyes are clear in this air,
he sees what few others can,
the lawn is mown,
we're here till we go.”
Yes, comes a measure marked Autumn
the passing of the little summer people,
schools of leaves float downstream
past lonely piers
soft still-water twilight,
morning ice on the minnow bucket.
My father said “I remember
a warm Thanksgiving Day
we shipped seine
without coats
nudged 20,000 lbs. of barged buffalo fish
thru the mouth of the river
by balmy moonlight
other times
you laid out with your hands glazed
to the nets”
You know, he said, they used to make
mincemeat with meat,
it's raisins now and citron—like
a house without heat—
I'll roof my house and jump from there
to flooring costs. I'll have to buy
two doors to close two openings.
No, no more pie.
He built four houses
to keep his life.
Three got away
before he was old.
He wonders now
rocking his chair
should he have built
a boat
dipping, dipping
and sitting so.
In Europe they grow a new bean while here
we tie bundles of grass
with strands of itself—as my grandfolks did grain—
against the cold blast
around my house.
From my cousin in Maine: We've found a warm place
(did she say in the hay?)
for the winter. Charlie sleeps late, I'm glad for his sake,
it shortens the day
around my house.
Paul
when the leaves
fall
from their stems
that lie thick
on the walk
in the light
of the full note
the moon
playing
to leaves
when they leave
the little
thin things
Paul
I've been away from poetry
many months
and now I must rake leaves
with nothing blowing
between your house
and mine
I am sick with the Time's buying sickness.
The overdear oil drum now flanged to my house
serves a stove costing as much.
I need a piano.
Then I'd sing “When to the sessions
of sweet silent thought”
true value expands
it warms.
The death of my poor father
leaves debts
and two small houses.
To settle this estate
a thousand fees arise—
I enrich the law.
Before my own death is certified,
recorded, final judgement
judged
taxes taxed
I shall own a book
of old Chinese poems
and binoculars
to probe the river
trees.
To Aeneas who closed his piano
to dig a well thru hard clay
Chopin left notes like drops of water.
Aeneas could play
the Majorcan sickness, the boat on which pigs
were kept awake by whips
the woman Aurore
the narrow sand-strips.
“O Frederic, think of me digging below
the surface—we are of one pitch and flow.”
My friend the black and white collie