Eleni Sikelianos
1 (Third hour’s residue)
3:44:45 We come to the dark double X and wonder what does a chromosome worry
whose genes carry ovary make a face what name arrive on the face what
shape When born she drew a line to the first mother from whom
was the first mother burned There were several shapes to edit a knot in the knee
a string of cancer these genes like loose squiggles of time I mean twine
which will fray at the ankle (time) go dust at the calf the hour does a face
Unsquare the hour of its making her elbow bleeds to a wing a sibyl
propped on 22 pairs of evidence
part of an hour is erasure like genotype stomping on phenotype
a blur at the edges of the thought box & wet paint around the caption
her macroscopically visible aspects (46,XX) in her haploid cell she sneezes to show she’s”th
(the quote marks keep falling off her )
ghosted the teeth of radiance
/petals /letters like the hour takes tweezers
to its hairs
3:16:35
what derives of the Desiring heart
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cries [/ ] unfurl in the
night
& unfold me
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A snake is holding the world in its jaws, the world is suspended there. Nothing touched the tooth,
lips, lids, mandibles. Nothing touched the hour, nothing touched the world.
The poem can be as risky as the body. Male & Black, Female & White. The body lies quivering
with self and self-doubt. The body covered with question marks. (Each pore punctuated by it.)
Lick it all over with your mirrored tongue. I mean there is another body in the bed. This adds
and subtracts doubt.
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I saw the nursing mouth occlude the nipple, and the person collecting there, under the eye’s delicate glass dome of the eyes. (Identity travels
with the milk.)
I had thought the person disperses in pleasure but hour by hour the baby assembled herself there.
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she calls I
answer swer a swerve a
brush of air I swear a scarf
a scarving her answer
answer me
2 (Fourth hour’s residue)
language hangs from the hour
in crystalline repose
to set it in motion must we
The hour’s stalk is feathered & gay
I saw it before it arrived shoeless helpless speechless
medusa dripping poison A’s each B a sting a stamp because because
daylight savings saddens the ghost
it’s amazing how hungry an hour can be Hand me something
to pillow the hour, protect it from its own devouring minutes
I had to do things to this hour I would never have wished
In the hour’s-heart’s garden of earthly delights
of all the world’s
marsh gas
tear gas
(lacrymogenic) made
to make me cry
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shattered across the bed: baby,
bodies
gods above their counterparts
below scattered
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A minute sat with gnashing teeth waiting on a rock
The human drips from herself where she hangs in time her
minutes are bleeding her bream a broken-mouthed minute
as if the minute as if the minute broken-mouthed machine
across a mirror of time
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the tear is locked in a wingcase
elytron
let loose again later
lampyridae a glowworm a firefly
tear become
my Variable Intensity Rain Gradient Aloft
nimbostratus virga over the desert or a day
there’s a microburst when light particles drift
& clouds and tears dressed up as ice crystals melt
before they hit the ground
3 (Fifth hour’s residue)
11:21:06
the hour’s seeds scatter
I know I knew some of these stars some of these stars
were friends
abstracted
from the hour’s ego the hour’s hours on earth
Clouds fall the six-sided hour calls itself hexagonal
orthopedic the hour
limps toward its destination the destination brain corals I mean it
doesn’t seem to but it shifts
every hour I saw declared itself a closed system
every hour I greeted had commerce with men every hour I scolded mouthed its blank (unprintable) intention
every hour geoded into something weird and good
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the problem with these hours, I said
is they are untrained intractable following their own whims
how could I ever gather enough (marry hour to hour)?
Unwed, its holes kept tearing, hungry, its rough-rag hem
Cease to describe the hour lest you smother it
Mother my hours though feeling dimensional go flat I lack tricks of perspective
I sought time enough to caulk all the crevices in an hour
words gather to fill the holes
lashing the hour or letting the hour be
the hour stomps its feet on me (triage)
I had struggled to know when the hour began to mind-read the hour to intuit its
landscape & disposition
you’d need a hummingbird
sucking the hour’s nectar
(its beak represents through the southeast corner)
the off-centers of my hour tangled me
in anthropy & misanthropy I tried to set them straight you cannot
chiropract an hour even an hour in need
12:21:15
Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. A book of selected poems translated into French, appeared in fall 2007, and forthcoming are a new book of poems, Body Clock, and her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges on Light. Among the awards she has received for her poetry, nonfiction and translations are a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Writing Fellowship, The National Poetry Series, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. She currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She shares her days with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace.