Eleni A. Sikelianos

gives sqwooshy kisses one by one
the liquid shimmer over the sandpapery surface of the earth
above: hang gliders: huge ribonucleic rubber birds do not remember
the guy upon whom the beach cliff
fell - one minute he was sitting innocently
in the sun on the evil beach
the next his bones were a pile of
jelly & the sack was the skin
& he was crushed, & he died
The rough & tumble D.P. guys like a good-bad god squad; if you dance
they’ll break your face
They know nothing
of the appeal of miniaturized space
Back at the Jurassic (smogging out the Channel Islands in a dun-colored haze)
oil in the air, the hair
of birds, “brillo birds,” hello
to my mother’s nostalgia for Haight/Ashbury like a tailless dog loping
through parks and owners with plastic bags tied on for shoes
In California, they like to stand around and pant a lot
I’ll go fell three grumpy bears Feed me
my archaic needs nights, no truck with
the mysterious curve
of the earth
pulling in
to the golden cities
and the waves flattened & the waves rise up & increase
their drag & the shore receives them: wave and wave and wave and wave
“And so on and on to the shoreâ ¦if you think from the sea
and if you think from the shore, it
touches and breaks.” Torsion
in the first moebius strip cannot compete with the waves’ amoebic figure 8
and as the course projects happily hypothetically straight from the wave and
around
the world mathematically, perfectly ragged the unified-field of wave
and wave & water & pull creature/tide
work out that ideal
the drift of it everything

All my good ideas, come
back to me! I’ve done $6.00 worth
of walking today and I want you
to come home. This is not
just dream-jargon. The city is out there, and you
are a citizen “What
do you report? I want the animals
to come to me from far and wide
over the frightened grass, just as they would if
this were a wishing-apple and the mountains
were hollowed by shadow. What do you want? A cup of
shit on the subway? (I saw it) Light
flashing out from behind
the elevator. Details
to 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 heart
bird, daughter of my own body, the fragments of its royal head floating up,
occipital;
Late summer wears an eerie light
on utility poles & shows
the 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 city
will soon be laid to ashes
Our island city
Rowing out over the river in the dark
They have divided
geometry onto it, stripped
off the mosses, stripped off the rocks, and replaced them
with concrete blocks. When you are thinking in the dark, think
of our city
as stitched dynamos switched on & shining at midnight, a vast land
of electrically charged siding and craters, & over it we lay
in 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 water
Bangor by sea
Anaximander by air
a large iron gate
Take Paris by river
Anaxagoras by thought
Take Zoraster by fire, Jesus

and the mutts by love,
Take fire by flashlight, take flight, between the allegory of each
is a narrow equatorial belt where everything is angular and real