Lorine Niedecker - Lake Superior lyrics

In every part of every living thing is stuff that once was rock In blood the minerals of the rock * Iron the common element of earth in rocks and freighters Sault Sainte Marie—big boats coal-black and iron-ore-red topped with what white castlework The waters working together internationally Gulls playing both sides * Radisson: “a laborinth of pleasure” this world of the Lake Long hair, long gun Fingernails pulled out by Mohawks * (The long canoes) “Birch bark and white Seder for the ribs” * Through all this granite land the sign of the cross Beauty: impurities in the rock * And at the blue ice superior spot priest-robed Marquette grazed azoic rock, hornblende granite basalt the common dark in all the Earth And his bones of such is coral raised up out of his grave were sunned and birch bark-floated to the straits * Joilet Entered the Mississippi Found there the paddlebill catfish come down from The Age of Fishes At Hudson Bay he conversed in latin with an Englishman To Labrador and back to vanish His funeral gratis—he'd played Quebec's Cathedral organ so many winters * Ruby of corundum lapis lazuli from changing limestone glow-apricot red-brown carnelian sard Greek named Exodus-antique kicked up in America's Northwest you have been in my mind between my toes agate * Wild pigeon Did not man maimed by no stone-fall mash the cobalt and carnelian of that bird * Schoolcraft left the Soo—canoes US pennants, masts, sails chanting canoemen, barge soldiers—for Minnesota Their South Shore journey as if Life's— The Chocolate River The Laughing Fish and The River of the Dead Pa**ed peaks of volcanic thrust Hornblende in ma**ed granite Wave-cut Cambrian rock painted by soluble mineral oxides wave-washed and the rains did their work and a green running as from copper Sea-roaring caverns— Chippewas threw deermeat to the savage maws “Voyageurs crossed themselves tossed a twist of tobacco in” * Inland then beside the great granite gneisse and the schists to the redolent pondy lakes' liles, flag and Indian reed “through which we successfully pa**ed” * The smooth black stone I picked up in true source park the leaf beside it once was stone Why should we hurry Home * I'm sorry to have missed Sand Lake My dear tells me we did not We watched a gopher there