…How good, after all, do the men have it? In one of her late sequences, "Paean to Place," Niedecker imaginatively re-creates her father’s state of mind in the long years of her mother’s illness:

[Perloff cites lines beginning "Anchored here" and ending "of her hair"]

Like the poet, who must "log - in the cupboard, head / in closet," her father is imaged as "anchored," "Roped … in the loop / of [his wife’s] hair," the rope metaphor suggesting that one’s noose is the product, not of external force, but of love itself – in this case, the sexual loop of a woman’s hair, a loop all the more mysterious in that it remains outside the man who sits "beside his shoes."