POET-IN-RESIDENCE, 1.8: Eleni Sikelianos
From the Flatmancrooked Winter 09/10 Poet-In-Residence, Eleni Sikelianos, comes selected poems, chosen by the poet from her body of work. These posts will appear every Sunday for the next ten weeks, after which a new Poet-In-Residence will be introduced and his or her work featured. This number 7 of 10. The poems featured in previous weeks can be found here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7
From The California Poem
(Hollywood, La Brea)
(Man moves in; animals
and plants move out)
Ages-extinct fires near tiny dragon-headed lakes
Chewing the fat fire-side & touching up a wooly mammoth, mastodon,
mini-horses, chasing
ground sloths the size of tanks____Giant shining
armadillo roll over ____(silver wheels crushing tender grasses)
Edentata belonging to the (inhabited) Earth, edacious at the tooth of Time
____nibbling some sweet thing, fiery
________Hymenoptera edulcorated by their history with men
Told jokes in the clean-flaked keen-flint
glowing coal ice-age night-wind
roared songs at hapless herbivores high moon near wet
meadow sedge
& cut across the cordilleras, rainwater sluicing down
mountainsides made whole new mesas, highlands thrown up
They made several suns & destroyed them
They made humans but destroyed them
They were looking for the right world
Was this the 5th California?
They let the demented Spanish invade, they kept
________the Spanish, kept
________the orange tree, abalone, they kept
Jayne Mansfield & destroyed her
They had no
star clock clucking
out the night hours
no way to track the ragged lights at the edges of towns
but the opossum god of all opossums
carrying corn in its pouch to feed peripheral citizens
& we could see
the parts inside the contours of the body
the dreams of liberation for yoginis of average capacities
the intricate irrigation canals covering Mars
the luminosity in the known moment before death
All that happened in the history books, all
the humans you’ve ever heard of or met
happened here, he said, pointing
to a little sandbox with a bone-tool, this
talking thinking meat, it
happened
on a wide & fat map
that encompassed California
where we dumped shit into the sea at West
or East, on this narrowing-in-the-middle map, belted
with cords dangling from Indiana, Ohio
I traveled here on a coal barge
in an earlier era with
winding roads through backwoods towns & canopies of trees
I sang their songs in night
cellars & concert taverns, every candyass
put-the-hawk-on-you in the shape
of Heaven & Hell, and other human capacities
I might find goccasion to
sing war & perfect soldiers\
the war that wages over the
face of the Earth, against
every edible turtle &
moveable tree, the tyranny
of money
From The California Poem, reprinted courtesy of Coffee House Press, 2004. This is from a mad endeavor, a 193-page poem (or series of poems) drawn from my childhood memories, researches into, and reinventions of present-day and historical California. A visit to the La Brea Tar Pits allows anyone to imagine Los Angeles gas it was between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age when animals such as saber-toothed cats and enormous sloths and armadillos groamed the Los Angeles basin. In this section of the poem, all times are contemporaneous in the mind, as the opossum god \ a pouched creature with an endless supply of food who could feed forgotten citizens \ coexists with wooly mammoths and Hollywood. The quote in the last stanza is from Whitman.
