Brandon Menke

It is the silences Niedecker authorizes. Between syllables comes the reprieve of silence — a generative darkness suggestive of the understory and the waters it shades. It is a space alive with the more-than-human — a corrective that sutures anthropophony to birdsong, rushing water, wind in pine, insect trill.

It is in that coldwater cabin to which Lorine invites us, deep in a recess of summer, that we can sort our linguistic artifacts — really see what it is we have heard — and fashion the formal lattices on which they constellate and thrive.

Sensibilities tending toward the maximal, I learn from Lorine the generosity inherent to thrift — a means of insuring that we all have enough. "Only in a country used to Too Much could this poetry, could all that is Enough be thought of as stinting," William Corbett writes in defense of this beloved poet, who sits beside Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler, makers of the "irreducible," in his "immortal cupboard" and mine.1

For Niedecker is both of her country and an exception to it. At a place in history cleaved open by the idiot thunder of war and the ghoulishness of capitalist greed, Lorine reminds me of the power of silence — its ability to make space for the unbidden. Luxuriating in the birdseye of unproductivity, she tells me in a high, queer voice I love: for land sakes, stop and breathe.

 

 

*     *     *

 

 

Faux Woodgrain & Actual Lichen

                                    for LN and after JW

                  Atop the crown, her halo
is sublunary — socialist gloriole — 
curved against a brick grid. Navy
velveteen — the head's lid does not give,
but draws light into it. Winter sun collects
on the lower band, embanking the grayed
chestnut hair that rises in wavelets
of cheerful senescence. Widowspeak —
though both her husbands, the fair farmer
and the Buick cruiser, outlive her —
and the furrowed brow repeats the cavern-
vault of thought. She is transplanted —
over 18 hours' walk from where Wisconsin
State Historical Marker 303 will stand
upstream from Koshkonong shores —
looking both out of place and of it.
As in: Nobody, nothing     than time / ever
gave me       unless light / greater thing      
and silence.
                     Chic as chicory
in bleak midwinter, the cat-eyes' turquoise
surprises, frames spreading like lepidoptera.
They sharpen what the disempowered
can't, but also doesn't need to: an inability
to bring the loved world into focus
adverts to physical sight's unnecessity.
Perceptible reality hangs in front of the eyes
like an uncomprehending screen,
which must be punctured or penetrated
to get to the after-fabric of the universe
beyond — and then mis-seamed —
French, felled, superimposed.

She hails from the unseen country,
where song unspools, threading
body and mind to itselves. This is true,
even if intuition's silver tyranny
ligatures the larynx. Could our cords
know such acuity, and not be undone?
Lorine pipes with wit's soul. Fledged
chorister, her Sphinx smile unreveals
its mystery to the lens, whose double
vision is echoed by the oversized buttons
blankly agape. O O What do the snows
of Milwaukee know of methane pearls
suspended in lunar lakes, supernovan
ecstasies, or the diamond rains
of Saturn noons?
                             Jonathan escapes
the square, but his signature resides here.
This gentleman from Appalachia
trains his vision on the cognomen
and the noumenon. He presses meta-fours,
untinears, & antennae for keeps in smart
volumes. Sensibilities suggest a vein
of Plutonic stuff must solder our continent
from rain-mellowed hills in North Cackalack
to Superior's agate-pocked shores. And,
even though we know that what the plates'
tectonics make the very same can tear it
asunder, their mutual regard endures.

L O R I N I A N A

            Notes on the margins of Immortal Cupboard
            by Cathy Cook

            with love to Lorene Menke

From the blaze of poppies
            back to a black-and-white woman
dolled up in polka dots departing her front door—

frog- and bird-chirp chorus
            segues from present to implied past — arriving
at now, waterfowl flap and coast

a seemingly mated pair

                        *

                                              Immersed trunks
                                   along the Rock fade to someone
      (Amy?) affixing a typewritten label
                                 to an immortal array of stacked hard-
                                              backs. A disembodied voice
                      (Ann's?) gives directions on how to reach
                               Lorine's cabin. Headlights thread
rivers of raw asphalt, shoulderless,
              in late June

                        *

                                              Named for the messenger
                                 who ferried
                                                          chthonic waters to Olympus
                        for the gods to swear by & beget
      forgetting — with her raiments of cloud & peacock sheen —
                           the muscular rings control the admission
               of light into dark

                                             letters forming
on cavern wall:   
                          " T h e r e is a story we tell ours e l v e s ,
                          and the story the world tells u s . "

                        *

Vexed fingers break
                                   reeds, node
by node. In languid waters, he seined —
              pronounced sEEned

                      Fall foliage, wren-
            brown & enviable — "Lorine" treads the riverine,
caresses corollas of native seed.

                                                 Wrong
                        aspect ratio truncates the text:

"There is nothing naïve about her."

                        *

                        Onionskin rattles left-
ward as arms rise and strike
                        Royal ribbon. Abrupt — en-
                        jambment marked —

                                                      white
                             field slides right, obscures
l e a v e s , my brother's family

                    collecting antlers
               clean of velvet

                        *

Mourning coos above cropped Audubon

            (and I recall the eagle's beak
painted pencil yellow)

                        *

                        Woman in cat-eye frames
fixes her gaze on river birch, brought into sharp
focus by obovate lens

                                       Blue night blurs.
                            She liberates milk-
                    weed floss from pod

          — such tentative creatures
                                                        An unclear man
                      discusses her musics — I note
chromatic indeterminacies

                        *

                        In stereo: the plaintive call of man's
foster mothers —
                                 Guernsey     Jersey     Holstein

                        *

                                  Gloved hands page
through Paean to Place.

                                             [Niedecker shares
              a name with my paternal grandmother,
but her cursive resembles Nanny's
(my mother's mother, who lived with Paw
            as newlyweds in a house raided by floods
            in the fertile sweep of river bottoms
                         before absconding to the hills).
            Grandma Lorene (observe different
orthography) turned 97 this December, pens
her letters (I save
                      each one) in block capitals
            and says, "I am ready for heaven."]

Last August, across the holograph,
my fingers bare

                        *

Considering oblivion:
                                       cattails and cornflower
reflections to dried helianthi and migrating gulls
                           to chanterelles aglow
in "scruffy community"

                        *

     Fat redwing
                          sways
                 a crooked stick above
          reedy Rock waters —

"I was surprised by the austerity of it all"

                                  Chief Oshkosh
              bottles half-
                           submerged in silt —
such dark honey

                        *

NORWAY     TANGIER     AIRCRAFT     LOND
NLAND     U.S.A.     PARIS     ROME     DAKAR

                        *

Cattails go to seed
              before the snows, and "Lorine," in seamed
nylons and fur-lined boots, opens her stove
         & reveals live embers.
                                                After, ice
              fishermen spoon out shards
                           with a sieve until
   the hole clears, leading to that blue land

                        *

Aeneas's phonograph plays
Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor

              "She was transfixed."

I like to imagine Glenn Gould chest

     swelling hair flashing lips a-

          quiver as his fingers flourish

               their native tongue —

                        *

Nixon, Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
magic mascara, helicopters in Vietnam

                        *

A screw sullen in roadside dirt

              desiccated muskrat corpses — bless
each orange incisor —

                             & a flattened bird (removed
                from field guide?)
                                               collapse of hollow bones
                              coronated in feather ruff

               but what of afterthought? Splash in
     summer flood.
Crows caw —
                          No.

                        *

     In the watercolor, she emphasizes
     the sandhills' red crests, their uneasy grace
     as they spread Pleistocene wings

     We hear their pterodactyl cries in the blue above.

                        *

Al pats her head in the home movie —

[no tumor, no clot in posthumous x-ray]

— after giving the Christmas toast:

_________________________ Cheers!

                        *

Irises — maize & Stygian

             night — along the marsh's edge —
                           that singing rim —

where it is closed in by fog

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Brandon Menke ( Twitter: @bamenke; Instagram: @queer_lyricism ) is a poet and scholar of queer art and literature. He is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His creative and critical work is found or forthcoming in Poetry, The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, and the edited volume Elegy Today: Revisions, Rejections, Re-mappings.

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