POET-IN-RESIDENCE, 1.7: 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

From The Book of Jon

Interview (Who is Asking / Who is Answering)

\ Pop, I’m writing a book about you. I mean, with you in it. Are you ready to do this interview?

\ Mmrmph.

\ Okay, where were you in 1963?

In 1963, my father was 17 and clean clean clean as a whistle. By 1968, I was three and he had descended into those dark and distant lands called Heroin. The sun warming his armpits in the afternoons.

\ What happens when that particular crystal gets slipped into the vein?

\ A dark water into which the light descends only a short distance, vestigial gill-slits emerge as the fluid colloid pours in. A luminous, liquid night. Underwater, one can think and dream. All our aqueous history laid out on the sea-floor. In the emulsified dusk, one can see the strings of a violin held down by eel-like pinkies. One can travel, one can go. (My father’s early aquatic life is redeemed.) The earth makes no light of its own, covered by a night’s pressure; what enemies here in the dark, what prey? Sounds and color detach from their objects and float away. Small invertebrates swim brightly through the bloodstream. On the surface, under a full moon, the ship establishes a new weight. Sperm moves through body walls, all the tidal animals\no longer rooted to lunar waters\beams, flashes, fluctuating densities, the body moves back, pre-Cambrian, toward the Polychaete worms. We can organize disorderly things in the world, put public telephone receivers back in their cradles. These were the myths that invented feelings. We do not have to be afraid of heat, or of water, nor fire.

From The Book of Jon, reprinted courtesy of City Lights, 2004. A book-length meditation on my father, who spent the last year or two of his life homeless in Albuquerque, where he died of a drug overdose in January, 2001. This isn’t strictly poetry; the book moves between forms \ prose, poems, letters, documents, photos, and dreams.