Lorine Niedecker

Thomas Jefferson

I

My wife is ill!
And I sit
            waiting
for a quorum
 
 

II

Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked
 
Borrowed a farmer’s
unbroken colt
To Richmond
 
Richmond How stop—
Arnold’s redcoats
there
 
 

III

Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves
 
Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he’d have done right
 
 

IV

Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity
 
I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy
 
 

V

                          The South of France
 
Roman temple
“simple and sublime”
 
Maria Cosway
      harpist
on his mind
 
 
white column
and arch
 
 

VI

To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy
 
No person full of work
was ever hysterical
 
Know music, history
dancing
 
(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)
 
Science also
Patsy
 
 

VII

Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles
 
(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)
 
and send salt fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other
 
 

VIII

Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:
 
“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—
 
the Bill of Rights hassle—
“he remembers . . .
 
in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”
 
 

IX

True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt
 
but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not—
 
house rent would have left him
nothing to eat
 
 
. . .
 
 
He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded
 
He could be trimmed
by a two—month migraine
 
and yet
               stand up
 
 

X

Dear Polly:
I said No—no frost
 
in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe
 
I’d have heard—I’m in that kind
of correspondence
 
with a young daughter—
if they were not
 
Now I must retract
I shrink from it
 
 

XI

Political honors
           “splendid torments”
“If one could establish
           an absolute power
of silence over oneself”
 
When I set out for Monticello
      (my grandchildren
               will they know me?)
 
How are my young
                    chestnut trees—
 
 

XII

Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage
 
I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—
 
I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science
 
or not at all
Next year the last of labors
 
among conflicting parties
Then my family
 
we shall sow our cabbages
together
 
 

XIII

Delicious flower
of the acacia
 
or rather
 
Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax
 
 

XIV

Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris
 
by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said
 
“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”
 
Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello
 
 

XV

My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia
 
The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die—down of life
but there is land
 
 

XVI

These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa—temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew  
 
and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar
 
You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels  
 
 

XVII

John Adams’ eyes
           dimming
Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism
                             cantering
 
 

XVIII

Ah soon must Monticello be lost
                  to debts
  and Jefferson himself
                                    to death
 
 

XIX

Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade
 
Martha (Patsy) stay
“The Committee of Safety
must be warned”
 
Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root
Other works by Lorine Niedecker...



Top