POET-IN-RESIDENCE, 1.6: 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 2 of 10. The poems featured in previous weeks can be found here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4

Captions for my Instruction Booklet on Naturally Historical Things

All my good ideas, comeback to me! I’ve done $6.00 worthof walking today and I want youto come home. This is notjust dream-jargon. The city is out there, and youare a citizen — What’syour report? I want the animals to come to me from far and wideover the frightened grass, just as they would if this were a wishing-apple and the mountainswere hollowed by shadow. What do you want? A cup ofshit on the subway? (I saw it) Lightflashing out from behindthe elevator. Detailsto make a philosophy? These won’t. But I will shout this dream out to you as soon as I have learned another bird-bone by heartLate summer wears an eerie light on utility poles & showsthe creatures we moved through to get here:

reptile, raven

varied faces emerging from the totem

Flocks of limbs come dark & forward, wings drawn down one by one

This is a subregister of a larger field, perhaps of a desert hunt with wild dogs

I suspect our citywill soon be laid to ashesOur island cityRowing out over the river in the darkThey have dividedgeometry onto it, stripped off the mosses, stripped off the rocks, and replaced them with concrete blocks. When you are thinking in the dark, thinkof our cityas stitched dynamos switched on & shining at midnight, a vast landof electrically charged siding and craters, & over it we layin the bright & in the dark if you fill your brain with Boston or New York

in this our talking America we will reach Thales by waterBangor by seaAnaximander by aira large iron gate

Take Paris by riverAnaxagoras by thoughtTake Zoraster by fire, Jesusand the mutts by love,Take fire by flashlight, take flight, between the allegory of eachis a narrow equatorial belt where everything

is angular and real

The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls, Green Integer, 2003, National Poetry Series Selection.

The lines “I suspect our city / will soon be laid to ashes” haunt me in this poem; I wrote it while living on the Lower East Side in New York, a couple of miles from the Twin Towers, a few weeks before the planes crashed into them. Our varied faces still emerge from the totem (of evolution, of human and animal endeavor), but our human world has since changed forever.