Overread at Table 2: Upon Reading Lorine Niedecker's "In the Great Snowfall Before the Bomb"

Upon Reading, “In the Great Snowfall Before the Bomb”

-          For Lorine Niedecker

 

It is hard to believe that I can find myself

falling in lust with poets short-dead, but who
lived long lives, poets who were old by the year
I was born, but whose words, (written for
times when iron ruled commerce with a fist
so much stronger than the virtual e-commerce
that plagues us today)squeeze into my veins
and worm their way into my heart.

Ah! WhomI folling?

‘Tis not your words, dear lady, that
entice me so:it’s your
avi . . . what you would have called your
            stock photo . . .
your soft cheeks, your stout neck, your
thick lower lip that looks so much like my wife’s –
your heavy lidded eyes that gaze, with such
fiercely stoic intelligence, outward toward
the impenetrable dark.