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A man called Dad walks by then another one does. Dad, you say and he turns, forever turning, forever being called. Dad, he turns, and looks at you, bewildered, his face a moving wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal that can't escape the field.
Copyright © 2010 by Eleni Sikélianòs. Used with permission of the author.
—after Alejandra Pizarnik
A yellow scraping across my skin when
I write the word “sky”
Not sky but scything :
to let day be scraped out
by night
I scratched down the word “flower” & felt
the parts draw away from the tongue.
Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost :
to gnaw on the crisp
skin once it’s been stripped
down from the meat
the neat meat
hiding under the table
of the skin’s
tablatures
right at the juncture where day/night meet
you can see it indicated by the perforated lines
whaThe snow falls, picks itself up, dusts itself off
a sparrow flying like a leaf back up to its tree
The future does a backbend toward you, it's
what you can almost see, scrimmed
in the clouds which crowd the sky, elbowing, laughing
After that I see space and its influence in a bucket of spinning water
and two calcium atoms shoot forth, twinned photons traveling
back to back, arms unlaced, perfect
swimmers in the lit dusk
Where are they going?
First, to Holland, then
to calcium-kiss her bones
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).