When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

At last, a few free days to save my precious little books from the wreckage. And how I'd missed them, their lovely smell and touch. The first one I rescue, an old love still dripping water, entangled in the seaweed:

My life is hung up / in the flood / a wave-blurred / portrait... My life by water.

Dearest, dearest Lorine.


Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows--
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.


Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley, LA: U of California P, 2002), p. 25.