The Marsh
I always think that the only poem by Niedecker that I have memorized is "I married." But, it's not memorized—every time I get to the part about which body part is hid where, I get confused. Niedecker always opens into strange possibility, leg in cupboard, or whatever it is. Her poems look so contained, but they demand more — no layoff from this condensery! They boil down; they put us to work. Always another wry pun, weird layer, sidelong look, historical unraveling. Her relentless attention to everything around her, her insistence on thinking across scales, is a spur — lark or bone — to look around, to record, to note the nothing.
Red Hands
Nothing worth noting
except the air—
an up-there where particulate
whits
waft and lodge
wet inside: they swim
and lurch through the floods
that blossom wax from
us—bosoms
metallic
*
Dog-thick mourning—
clear only
where I now talk.
Such rarity
I carry with me.
Try to see
the lake, the sky,
that easy make—
the dragonfly.
Sarah Dowling (@SarahMDowling1) is the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, and three poetry collections including, most recently, Entering Sappho. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
