Thus, Speak the Chromograph
Saying: One night in a cloud chamber I discovered a thing: that a thing (I used to have a crown of light) a thing could be more than True, and more again than False, a thing could carry its name with a ticket of lights called Possible: In a cloud chamber, particles are betrayed by movement and water vapors leave trails. Discovered: when matter and its antithesis come together, a disappearing flash of light: (our share of night to ear) (I mean what I say): In contempt of the Law of All Excluded Thirds: laws are not symmetrical in the forward and the back (of time). On which side are they stacked? and the sky also (is what made Hart Crane so crazy in the heart) continued to pile up clouds without account, a mass of gasses with nothing scribbled under them; a song in the middle of the crystal cavatina. We hardly had any bones then. Did Hart Crane have bones? If so, which kind? And how far down? It was written in the boned hours, the Book of Weeds, a treatise on leaving the house at dusk, when all buildings have already had time enough to fit themselves back into shadows. As if there were only: dusk-to-dusk, between dusk-and-dust where no animals asserted themselves as separate from the day, and the night comes again, as it always has done. The fact was that I could not follow the map––because the Book of Nature was written in math’s un- certain language, author of black rains, why the naked eye unclothed can see between math’s limits why a baby’s bones are soft as pudding when first let out of the water & take a long time to harden, you can flatten a newborn ’s skull by placing it on a board, the death-hole of the cranium takes 6 months to close and then grow brittle In describing the last arc of the last circumferance: I miss(ed) that halo. (How long it took to understand rivers run toward the sea)
Copyright © 2001 Eleni Sikelianos. From Earliest Worlds, by Eleni Sikelianos. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved.