Elizabeth Robinson
Lorine Niedecker Harmonizing With Paul Celan

We both know that the fugue is waterborne. The neologism
of the buoyant, or its compound word, the slant
rhyme of those who sink.

Scrub the floors.
Chew the sleepcorn.

All our mothers are dead or deaf. All our masters
sing the flood. The rise
in the word, the hermetic correspondence
we drowned before exchange. The penultimate
breath, your golden air.

 

 

Jack Spicer’s Frying Pan
for Fran Herndon

A small frying pan results in a small man. Or vice, alchemically,
versa. A pan and a man cook identically each time and
size desires nothing of it.

Cook it again this way, exactly.
Center the heart of the pan on the coil, turn
the handle west to where the sun will someday
set. Pan
and man

exact to the red coil. The game

of feeding ourselves is utmost ritual
and so we win the game.

The smallest frying pan, like a pendant hung
at your sternum, a brand on your breast,
enlarging the want of it, the game of the want
of it, the specimen of the pan, with its magick
handle to the east where someday the sun may rise

exactly as the eating proceeds, red coil, exact, I said, exact.