NOTE: The poems found in these Featured Pages are from Sikelianos' forthcoming collection The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls. The book, a 2002 National Poetry Series selection, will be published by Green Integer/Sun & Moon Press (Summer, 2003).
Melospiza melodia, Mon livre d’oiseauIn this landscape: scattered stations from which a pair or pairs of eyes might observe the scorpion’s “bright hooks” silhouettes of migrating birds against the moon; a field where land- scapes diverge; winter’s closing of lakes coming on, and birds between their breeding regions. Between the hills, a confluence, crumbling The Grey-cheeked Thrush takes off from home to head toward other homes. Something distills, heavy industry; hinted-at hit and runs untangling, hawking questions of the soul’s defunct & tabulating high TV-tower corpses; unravel this guttural; our capacities to home at different elevations and hours of the night; cars speeding pleasure at our heels, our shoulders invented in curves, birthmarks lit upDreamt My Teethdreamt my teeth were white as light I’ve got a flag on my back; make it be Not civic, but this meritorious monarch with wings Of finely woven golden thread just as The hairs on the human head Weave a lazy bracelet beneath the rock When the human is deadDream Poem Twodreamt our city was destroyed, and we were there while the huge, bullet-shaped bombs whistled and smashed into buildings, lights crashing around & above us; dark, night-time sky; the end of our days in cafés, in beds, in each others’ arms, in safety, in dark or in light in libraries, in markets with bright things all around; the only thing left in the dream is to make love in a light-filled gutter; so let Odysseus’s foot fall back in the basin tonight, the bright beads of water bathed in blonde airSelections from "The Bright, the Heavy" (a series from the forthcoming collection) are found on page 2
Continue to Sikelianos Feature, Page 2
I - Trinkets in a Closed Drawer
II - A Wrinkle in the Trees
III - Becoming a Fish
IV - Closer to the Cosmos
Afterword - A Poem by Nell Maiden
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Current Issue - Summer 2003
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