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Dedication

for Kate and Max Greenstreet

a pencil

for a wing-bone

LORINE NIEDECKER

I

I

In prison

In prison

without being accused

or reach your family

or have a family           You have

conscience

heart trouble

asthma

manic-depressive

(we lost the baby)

no meds

no one

no window

black water

nail-scratched walls

your pure face turned away

embarrassed

you

who the earth was for.

The whitewashed walls

The whitewashed walls, the chair

Were we nursed by the same wet-nurse?

The cups of tea undrunk

The crumb of tobacco on your lip

The poems in our speckled notebooks

where we warmed our hands

over the quick fire

Long before the woodstove’s wood and coal

shifted and settled and warmed us

Even months before

Even from miles away

The Leopard

Like a leopard on a shield, the space leopard

lay down beside the basket,

and slowly I threw all the papers in.

I was glad to throw them in.

Every coldness ever breathed

had left its trace elements inside me;

the oldest mother god’s most silent love

had left its trace: her

cave paintings black and gold

& red in the caves of my body.

In the end,

I laid them all down there at the leopard’s feet,

I was glad to lay them down.

Even all night long

Even all night long while

the night train

pulls me on in my dream

like a needle

Even then, down in my bed

my hand across the sheet

anyone’s hand

my face anyone’s face

are held

and kissed

the water

the child

the friend

unlost.

I was working

I was working on cleaning up a house

before I left it.

The longest work every year was Clean the house

before we moved.

The mother as a child was always moving,

who knows why.

I, said the fly.

With my little eye.

If I clean up this house here long enough,

I can leave it.

But leave the eye next to where I

put my house, this way, that way —

“As with rosy steps the morn”

in memory of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Everyone

on the other side of the earth

standing upside down, listening,

Everyone on the reverse of the picture

on the other side of the measuring eye

The five notes, slowly, over & over,

and with some light intent,

And the whole air,

no edge, no center,

And the light so thin, so fast —

Don’t listen to the words—

they’re only little shapes for what you’re saying,

they’re only cups if you’re thirsty, you aren’t thirsty.

Dear Family,

“[the chrysalises] came out with their wings packed down… like crumpled letters… Some did not get quite free… ”

REBECCA SOLNIT, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

November 1862. Dear Family,

Lying here tonight, looking into the fire, waiting for fire,

I was seeing our fire at home, in my mind’s eye:

Mother, the little girls—

but then gunfire— we took up our guns

I’d have gone forward, but

then went the right eye of my body,

Mother,

don’t read this yet,

my thoughts are still packed down

like crumpled letters, and some of us

will not get quite free —

Canoe

Listen to the crescent

Listen to

the thin old house

Black Elk

smoking with us

pulling to us

up to the late dock

the canoe

Not enough bark

It was stretched till it broke

Patched, pale colors

An old horse, almost completely blind

A map

to the end of this world or cycle

The Japanese garden

The Japanese garden

is tilting quietly uphill

—eleven wet green stones,

bamboo, and ferns—

It might be under water,

the birds be fish, colored in.      And you,

masked reader:            the glance

of your underwater lamp,

your blackwater embrace —

not bought or sold.

Ghost Elephants

In the elephant field

tall green ghost elephants

with your cargo of summer leaves

at night I heard you breathing at the window

Don’t you ever think I’m not crying

since you’re away from me

Don’t ever think I went free

At first the goodbye had a lilt to it—

maybe just a couple of months—

but it was a beheading.

Ghost elephant,

reach down,

cross me over —

On a Passenger Ferry

in memory of Grace Paley

The deck is big, and crowded. In one corner,

an old woman, sick, on chemo, not in pain, is

writing in an elementary school notebook.

Nobody else saw her, but I saw her.

I had seen her before. Her round, kind face,

smiling and still as a photograph

outside a window —

Then Abraham

Then an old man came down out of the thicket,

with an axe on his shoulder, and with him

two people made out of light

—one a blameless son,

the other like a Vermeer girl,

on their way back down with the old man.

Still, all the history of the world

happens at once: In the rain, a young man

holds out a blue cloth

to caress her head

at the landing-pier

of the new bride.

You can’t get beauty. (Still,

in its longing it flies to you.)

Traveler

A matchbox painted and figured

with five gardeners

and thirty-seven flowers, red and blue,

a pretty garden.

One little fellow stands off.

Anybody can see

love is all around him,

like the blue air. Most

dear in the Double Realm

of music, he is a Traveler.

He stands off, alone.

When somebody dies, as is the custom,

he burns the place down.

Coyote

Walking last night in the drought-country dark

she heard wolves howl. No,

coyotes.

Sexual love

coyotes crying

breathing close

This morning it was on the radio

it’s turning a little cooler, she is turning

She has given her purse of money

away, it’s time

to turn back into Coyote

My, my Coyote in the doorway

Hawkins Stable

It was years before you could climb

back up over the fallen stalls, and knock at

the family’s old door

—they were gone,

you could just look in from the road.

Field after field.

Your eyes looked two ways at once.

Under the fields,

the dense tongue of the cow —

and the horses’ eyes —

and the water from the hand-pump in the sink,

racing like horses.

II

II

Who watches

for Dr. Paul Farmer

Who watches

on a moon-surface hillside

the soon-dead children’s rubber ball

circle in an oval

sunstruck orbit,

from hand to hand…

Cange,

Haiti,

Earth

Time is matter here

Time is matter here

The freight train

I saw in the morning

still in the evening

inching across the flatlands

word after slow word

too many to count

And you are matter—

your eyes, your long legs,

slow breath sometimes catching

in your sleep, your head

resting against the bus window,

tired horse,

tired rider

Earth and the Librarian

At the library

she passed a tray with little

books of baked earth on it—

—Take one,

and eat it;

It is sweet,

and it is given for you.

— Who lives in me?

said Earth —

Her car

Her car had hit another car.

The other driver’s insurance person called.

It was all going well,

a matter of time.

She lost her tongue. It was her taste

for life, for herself, for others.

She found her tongue on the floor

and paper-clipped it to

the kitchen calendar. This was back in the day

of Separation. Permanence.

The World inside This One

There is another world

but it is inside this one

ÉLUARD

Steamer trunks

standing on end

standing open

like big books

The world inside of that one

mass graves

like in this one

Inside of that world

someone painting

animal-souls

Inside the dark

huge sounds

Poet

I’m standing there

behind your grandparents, proud,

saying goodbye:

you with your three dresses,

your prettiness,

going up to the city—and beside you

the devoted, tall shadowy monk.

(Two were seen leaving.)

(Two were seen leaving.)

And inside them            deep space

And deepspace loves them

moving slowly its thumb

across to the speck of gold there

there on her lip

but not hunger

or hunger not granted

The treeless hill

The treeless hill that gave holes

in its dirt cliff to the swallows

in the long wet light of June, the open

cliff by the road that gave

them nests, your cold wet sweater,

sweater you were born in, softer then,

like any swallow

The just-born rabbits

The just-born rabbits in the garden

huddled blind, translucent, hardly here

I called John (a farmer),

and asked him what to do:

Put your boot on them. Now you’ve been there,

the mother will never come back.

—life from whom

death also springeth green

—thy leave to sleep

The valley

The valley

edge by edge

bare field by field

I walked through it through you

rain by rain

cold by cold

root absence

and the purposeful cold

Eye opened

slow

but what is slow

On the bus

the ghost-bus travels along beside us

and the reading-light,

a straight-faced little moon

And you cloud, ragged, legless rabbit

with your long nose

and your enormous eye

Tell me

What is the name for a non-endstopped line?

Who was it M. looked like?

Was it Kafka?          Kafka,

is that your enormous eye?

Ecstatic eye,

still see us              your same clay

The branches

The branches looked first like tepees,

but there was no emptiness.

Like piles of leaves waiting for fire:

at the foot of the wisewoman trees,

at the foot of the broken General.

Next to the tree of the veteran

girl who died this summer     slow red

cloth

Red cloth

Red cloth

I lie on the ground

otherwise nothing could hold

I put my hand on the ground

the membrane is gone

and nothing does hold

your place in the ground

is all of it

and it is breathing

III

III

Don’t silence yourself, No te calles

He took some words from the bowl

and placed them on the table

No te calles

I took some too

placed them near to his words

Martín Ramírez

After,      slowly, slowly

from childhood

towards him       followed my footsteps

circling sometimes

sometimes falling     in a quite practical way

to sleep           to speak

Eurydice who guides

Eurydice who guides              Orpheus who guides

who first has to return to death

the one who sings

the one who opens first

of all the animals his

mouth to her song

her thirst his thirst

the ones who nurse each other

Don’t be afraid the blackened saucepan said

I met them in the country by a well

and once I drank from them

I never thirst

If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them

in memory of Reginald Shepherd

Dear Reginald,

It is morning.

I sit at a table

writing a letter

with a needle and thread.

I pricked my finger          A pelican

out of her migratory path,

even her language family—

whose child is gone

yet she absently pecks at her breast.

I write on the bedspread

I am making for you there

May you breathe deeply and easily.

If a person visits someone in a dream,

in some cultures the dreamer thanks them in the morning

for visiting their dream.

I call it dream

not that I am drawn to that which withdraws

but to him pearled, asleep, who never withdraws.

At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and

damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if

they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are

ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.

Can you breathe all right?

Break the glass

shout

break the glass

force the room

break the thread

Open

the music behind the glass.

Remember that blue vine?      Grown

alongside the gate

fourteenth century

Venus close as the moon

the bowl of the skull    turning here

lifting that

I dropped a plate

I dropped a plate and broke it

it came from a set

I keep the scraped-down leak marks from the rain

on the wall from two years ago

layers blue and tan

Page 7

Page 8

The broken, the underneath,

the backwards:

On the radio, Merce said, Do it backwards,

Jump first, then run,

even if it was just with his arms, when he got old,

even if some people hated it

Desert Prison

If every present is possible,

how can we have eyes to see?

The teacher and I, the guest, both free, class over,

just walking down the corridor, out to the gate

The teacher and I, looking wildly

how to mend

the man’s head that the other man had stabbed—

Where to wash

your head           that they had stabbed

You kneeling, by the door,

trying to get out of the corridor —

You ask,

Could we have coffee?             —No, my truth,

I’m still on this side.

I saw you last night, again,

at the bar on 57th,

O faceless dancer,

and I put down my mask

I wanted you to touch me

You stood there neither man nor woman,

beautiful edge           by the water

The Young Mother

Milk called out of the breast

to the just-born mouth

Inside the earth

earth came

All membrane

no sound

—orgasm—god—

be my unshareable secret?     unreceived?

I’m sad, Warden

Are you sad

All you people looking out from the stern

of the white ship Withholding

—I’ll take my babies

and swim

I thought It’s time

I thought It’s time to go into the forest with a bowl.

Maya said, It’s all one thing,

student, householder, forest.

The blue man said,

You are the forest and the bowl

—as he made a trail of tobacco, or cornmeal,

back to the foot of my chair.

Jack said,

You don’t need

a bowl. Putting his cupped hands together

in front of him on Eighth Street

—the trees walking toward us

hands cupped in the light of Eighth Street.

On the CD, in the rainstorm

in memory of Michal Kunz

On the CD, in the rainstorm

the healer whispers what he hears from his guides.

His whispers are a quiet-stepping rainstorm

stepping across the room.

Michal

—I hope you don’t mind my saying this—

sits down with us and looks up into the rain.

They say

he will write

if not his poems

other poems.

Old love, I want to phone you

I miss another body in this life.             But miss

you, turned-away?

Can I miss not-love? The centuries say

Sure possible, all the languages say, all the

bodies, the trees. Ice storms.

In her room

a student cuts angular lines

into her arm.

The blue man says, Don’t cut, they’re saying (he listens, whispers,

then he talks) they’re saying           For the present

A body by herself cán be in love on earth.

Diana

The tab on the tea bag said

“Love what is ahead

by loving what has come before.”

But what came before was no dream

you wake from, it was human sacrifice:

Diana was herself, and Actaeon, who saw her naked,

and the stag he was turned into

(who was God)

and the blind dogs

and the death of God

“for the sin of seeing.”        God

still childbearing, naked, seeing.

Do we get another life?       Oh yes.

Maybe not in this place.     Maybe in different forms.

The older man among us

The older man among us looked right through me.     Lost.

Without expression.   Long look.    Who were you?

I had a glass of water in my hand.

Are you my grandfather?     Would you like to drink?

I wished I was a horse, and I could lay

my head over your neck.

He Disappeared into Complete Silence

The wild ladders of longing

no longer pieces of wild wood, sawed off

and fitted to each other,

no longer stored in a closed-off room

with one blank window

But called back, through

the closed-off wooden ceiling, to his

speech returned.

I am fain a page in the court of space

I have pulled the elements in no order

in around me, like a blanket:

elephant blanket.

It will harden when I take it off,

my skin, when I

leave you on the ground and walk away.

A page

air

a pen

water

books

earth

friends

fire

IV

IV

Lucy

Lucy

for Sister Leslie, C.H.S.

Lucy, whose skeleton is approximately 3.2 million years old, whose genus and species are “Australopithecus afarensis, or ‘southern ape of Afar,’ after the region of Ethiopia where the bones were found,” was discovered in 1974, at Hadar in northern Ethiopia. “The Ethiopian people refer to her as ‘Dinkenesh,’ an Amharic language term meaning ‘You are beautiful.’”

Lucy

your secret book

that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt—

Not having to have an ending

Not having to last

…in thy book all my members

were written, which in continuance

were fashioned, when as yet there

was none of them.

PSALM 139:16

Two hands

were all you owned

for food

for love

Now you own none, Lucy

nor no words

only

breath marks

breath marks

only

nor no words

Or what do you do now Lucy

for love?

Your eyeholes.

Lucy

my saxifrage that splits the rocks

wildgood

mother

you fill my center-hole

with bliss

No one is so tender in her scream

Wants me so much

Not just, but brings me to be     Is

when I am close to death

and close to life

The spider

in her web three days

dead on the window Lucy

In the electricity of love, its lightning strike

or in its quiet hum in the thighs

like this little icebox here

not knowing any better

or in the dumb hum of the heater going on

little stirs in the room-tone

I rush outdoors into the air you are

Lucy

and you rush out to receive me

At last there you are

who I always knew was there

but almost died not

meeting

when my scraped-out child died Lucy

you hold her, all the time.

Lucy

when the dark bodies

dropped out of the towers

When Ruth died

and Grace

and Helen Ruth

And Iraq

and Iraq

And Nikolay

Lucy, when Jane in her last clothes

goes across       with Chekhov

you are the ferryman, the monk

Ieronim

who throws your weight on the rope.

I wash my plate and spoon

as carefully as a priest.

Did you have a cup, Lucy?

O God who transcends time,

let Lucy have a cup.

You bodhisattva here-

with-us. You wanted to come back!

I’m afraid

and can’t pay attention

to it       I’m

wild with heat and cold

and my head hurts:

The nine wild turkeys come up calmly to the porch

to see you, Lucy

My Work of Art

for Lucy

It’s a piece of brown wrapping paper

taped to the wall     over the table

in this beautiful room with no pictures

First, written across the top:

“It was as if she was standing

across the road

waiting to see if anyone

wanted to get to know her.”

Then taped under that:

Du, der du weißt, und dessen weites Wissen

You who know, and whose vast knowing

is born of poverty, abundance of poverty—

make it so the poor are no longer

despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about

like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

Then a blue panther, a twenty-six-cent stamp

from Florida, for postcards

Then a catalpa leaf curving

from its huge curving stem, the leaf

a little broken in its passing

from the West down to the East

and the note: I found this leaf

on my way to the Post Office.

Then Lucy you: hominid? sapiens?

sapere, to taste, be wise

Your skeleton

standing about, like a wildflower…

Lucy, what you want,

that I will do.

To hear you now.

Your poem. (But you need nothing.)

The deer and the wild turkeys

that draw close now to hear you.

My life is for.

In its language.

Your voice.

I can’t tell cold from heat.

Anxiety

dust.

Death, no

not even dust.

Your Picture

Brown museum hair, brushed the way they brush it there,

brow lit from inside,

intelligent eyebrows,

a slightly wrinkly nose, a little flat—

brown woman, I want your nose, your

cheekbones of light—I was brown, I got white—

Your large and friendly mouth, half-open

in a half-smile,

like the Dalai Lama once, in a procession,

his smile “What am I doing here?”

But Lucy

your eyes.

So I gave all I had to the poor, standing about

like wildflowers.

Lucy,

the spider moved, last night,

and again, this morning…

I wonder Do you sleep and wake

where you are now? Do spiders

hibernate? Do they lay eggs

in webs on windowpanes?

You must know

everything.

Enter the sweet Why

Don’t entreat it

or question why

whistle why

whisper why

was sweetness done to you

done unto you

What I wanted most      the mother

has come to me

Will she stay in my ear? Lucy

Is it you?

Still all night long my

Lucy I entreat you

I will not let thee go except thou bless me.

Outsider Art

Martín Ramírez,

be with me!

“It looks just like a vagina,”

a bystander said. Yes

it is a vagina, with trains, and tunnels,

and like in the great cathedrals,

a clitoris, a starry one,

and a womb, jaunty Martín being born, Lucy

did you hear animal-woman

screams in the night?

Were you afraid?

Was it you last night

your scream over and over

as you give birth?

How did you pray, Lucy?

You were prayer.

Your hands and toes.

When writing came back to me

I prayed with lipstick

on the windshield

as I drove.

Newton made up with the world,

he had already turned himself

into gold, he was already there.

Skeleton Woman,

in    down

over    around

Bless:

from the Old English blētsian.

Its root is blood.

My head is at your window, Lucy, at your glass,

But we offer nothing but money now,

we beam it to each other near and far,

But you are my skeleton mother,

I bring you

coffee in your cemetery bed.

This morning I miss most of all you, Martín,

and her who when you were born

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