The Orphic Review

For Lorine Niedecker

So there you are, now: movement, rest, repeat—

a music all sublunary, a song

that’s keyed to the terrain beneath the feet,

between Rock River and Lake Koshkonong,

a paean to the marsh, the harshness there

that stirs up from the bottom of Mud Lake;

it lay beneath the leaf decay, its lair

antique among the blackness, half-awake.

Yet half a world away, the tide is low

tonight, and wave on wave here all the while

sings movement, rest, repeat against the stone.

Low tide reveals the sediment below

the thin, salt-eaten shafts of aging piles.

It shows the shallowness of this lagoon.

The cabinet of consciousness we close

ourselves in cannot adequately draw

forth pictures of the world in which arose

our being, driven to discover law,

or, it may be, composing it within

its limits. The worldhood of the world, if at all,

reveals itself in things-at-hand we spin,

then weave like threads, or parts in a madrigal.

The young girl walks along the pebbled shore,

and dances with the waves, yet somewhere knows

the rhythm of those waves, and hers, is more

than wetness on the skin that comes and goes

in endless motion—something like a door

that opens to a world the waves disclose.

In days when thoughts arose and kindly stayed—

late June, when morning twilight is displayed

above the northern forest like a net

that gathers up the trees in silhouette,

the kindliness of thought stands out; its heft

possesses all the strangeness of a gift;

its music, tautological desire,

abstracts what our exactitudes require.

The movement of that rhythm is intel-

ligence in beauty, cold water from a well

or spring whose coldness represents a dream

of extricating truth from passion’s seem.

A hope recalls this sonnet here below

the surface—we are of one pitch and flow.

Eric T. Racher was born in Akron, Ohio and currently lives in Riga, Latvia. He is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Five Functions Defined on Experience: for Jay Wright.