The Long Canoes by Lorine Niedecker

from NORTH CENTRAL


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