Eleni Sikelianos is the author of Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001). Her work has appeared in Grand Street, Chicago Review, Sulfur, New American Writing and other journals. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. Canto: Rocks (which Hold the History of the World Thus Far) Look! It’s a rock depicting the solid outer world! I’m looking at it through a flea-glass – It has to do with all the human atoms in history Live rocks are at the roots of clouds? or is it (as always) the other way around? The grasses are a soft grace. Grasses please the heart, rock to rock, mountain to mount, woman to man. Then follows a Book for each of the nine kinds & three faces of rocks, beginning with Trees & Feathers and Flowering plants. (It goes as far as the infinite series.) First the he in here was enthusiastic of what and was speaking with pebbles in his mouth, then he was running and speaking with rocks//Next, he was a woman with salt at the back of the throat// What conquers how we might talk is the will to do so There is a correspondence to the object and a way of loos(en)ing the teeth,                                      speech,                  I sucked the hammer & chisel from the marrow of the rock. In a pyrrhic history in the victory of rocks I made the ear do the work of the eye, with a noctograph, recorded the eidetic memory of rocks             The dull mind rises through that which is material             & is resurrected, anew a luminous skeleton, a thunder-,             ice- , fire-, T.-, a bird given over             to us, newly             tottering in new air In rocks like unto gold or silver or stone I saw the films of ice the crystalline intelligence of war, still point of the turning world, delight taken in at the ears, the lowly heights – Behold we are moving towards something that resembles a daily life (The "movies" entered in 1912);     we had a done thing     a thing we had done, & doing it     a doing thing being done & the doing of that thing done being done     Then there were rocks.   (They soon added rhythm to speech by acquiring gestures.) (They will add vowels and we will express ourselves.) Someone will cluster consonants and we will produce pictures. (Feelings sought refuge from absolute speech.) ("I recommend flicking the tongue to chase out the last of it.") Behold the beholden progressing from past to future. Spectators jumped from 0 to 12. Things used to be made & moved of stone & all that was done or felt or thought & the myth of all that was felt or thought and done throughout the course of the far forward & far back, extending on & on in die Nacht of rocks & in the day of glass & breaking forward & back Essay: In the Land of What Dress I’d like to share this news: where were you when we were getting hired?                                                  (I was getting into my scintillating towering super shiny super green metallic     super duper iridescent bug dress I was wearing       out of the forest to outshine             you all (quietly)) I am stuck in the Land of What Dress to Wear–:    Nice barn, nice house Flags and poles, and flags and poles, but                                                               Dear Midwest, in the flat flat flatlands (in the) (heart-) My poems made the low plains, the Cowpalace, move. Travelogue: When We Consider the Dark Light if you could hear a town grow, to wondr about other, distant objects by the 10’s and dozens    a block away    from everything    in the world: (saw them) in Ontario hauling tobacco up to the rafters, Erie Eau town to the right, & to the left, the Erie Eau girls I lay flat of my belly (this is an old hobo trick) washing my feet in Niagara water             To the left, the stretch into endless are dark at night"    the incalculable is a vast number increased by multiples,  then by squares the length of one zero occupies how much space it takes me to wake the body as a boat which crosses death        or sleep   is it   with or without measurement?    the "heart" is the seat of the "intellect;"  the heart is wrapped in paper & re-inserted; the head takes animal form (qubehsenuf)   probably a cow, just as a man or woman will smoke the lights moving in and out at the darkened peripheries of cities or an atom’s parts will weave at the brightish middle, and when we put our fingers to the heart, it goes out, lighting it up by thinking  the thinking heart   so smokeable Essay: Of Sun, of History, of Seeing In this one, seeing is a form of touchng (take darsan/ take image/ take sight) the eyes are the last part completed the eyes are finally opened with a golden needle At the moment of its most complete irradiation : the navel : the eye : unfolds a (silk) pavilion a peduncle of (gold) leafing into the road the goal becomes to obey (without question) the (something) linked by way of (something) to an hour a season with nothing in particular to justify it –– as hard as I tried    /     a screen of my eyes to have nothing   in front of them   but my hands as in when looking one is said to see the thing better when looking away // to adhere to there / I couldn’t ankle the effort of other flowers to satisfy the names which came to faces to make a person  :  the eyes are finally opend with a golden needle to answer the luminosity of creation wth simple organs I shall survive on prairie mice.