Collecte Works (30 page)
Authors: Lorine Niedecker
To whom
can I leave
Audubon's Avocet
on green sportsman's cloth
wide oak framed
above the warm polished
copper-braced sweet-smelling
cedar box
when I must leave
this flyway
Margaret Fuller
She carried books
and chrysanthemums
to Boston
into a cold storm
Watching dancers on skates
Ten thousand women
and I
the only one
in boots
Life's dance:
they meet
he holds her leg
up
Hospital Kitchen
Return
the night women's
gravy
to the cleaned
stove
Chicory flower
on campus
Open-field
blue-wheeled
gone by hot noon
to revolve
earth-evolved
mind-city
Fall
Early morning corn
shock quick river
edge ice crack duck
talk
Grasses' dry membranous
breaks tick-tack tiny
wind strips
LZ's
As you know mind
aint what attracts me
nor the wingspread
of Renaissance man
but what was sensed
by them guys
and their minds still carry
the sensing
Letter from Ian
Aye sure
a castle on a rock
in the middle of Edinburgh
They floodlight it—
big show up there
with pipe bands
and all
Down here along the road
open your door
to a posse of poets
Some float off on chocolate bars
and some on drink
Harmless, happy, soft of heart
This bottle may breed
a new race
no war
and let birds live
Myself, I gripped my melting container
the night I heard the wild
wet rat, muskrat
grind his frogs and mice
the other side of a thin door
in the flood
I knew a clean man
but he was not for me.
Now I sew green aprons
over covered seats. He
wades the muddy water fishing,
falls in, dries his last pay-check
in the sun, smooths it out
in
Leaves of Grass.
He's
the one for me.
Scythe
Spite
spit
loud
sound:
where is my scy'?
Why
by your nose—
so close
a snake
would've bit
So he said
on radio
I have to fly
wit Venus arms
I found fishing
to Greece
then back to Univers of Wis
where they got stront. 90
to determ if same marble
as my arms