“how all Eternity proceeds from Time alone…”

And time refuses to be anything less than its own overgrown ecosystem. I’m having a hard time keeping track of all the animals. Proliferating grasses grow loudly in the night. Eyeshine in the dark through the reeds, a rustle. A lion leaps across calendar weeks, ignoring the black bars meant to cage days in. Birds, too, flit through the years, bleed into other birds, then die.

Was time an abstraction or an extraction? A substance or an action. My beloved says time is a lichen, between worlds but living. I’m saying he says it is. In the way that minerals are and don’t think about us much. In that way, it turns out time is already liberated. It’s just the humans who can’t stop losing track in the dream Time ⇔ Money. “That there is a future tense is astounding. A night-thought soon to be abolished by daylight. See through it like water.”

Methods of Transmission

Once a woodcutter went out to cut down a tree, when a bird or a woman said from its branches, stop! From the oak, the dove spoke and told the woodcutter that to hear the future he must listen to the birds and wind as they whisper through the leaves. I am not sure you will like what they say, said the bird. The man’s ax hovered midair, a glint of sun dropping on it like a bead of oil.

In another story, you carry a guesthouse in your own left calf. You climb out of the guesthouse in which you yourself are a guest in the river in your calf. You climb out, sit glistening and dripping on the shore watching the river shimmer and purl. You shiver. You watch. At some point, you will be ready to step back into the ripples without drowning. What is it you must bring with you? You look along the riverbanks. All girls born here have many or no family names, which confuses things.

An Inventory

Oracular      (O)                                                                               Not Oracular (NO)

Mothers                                                                                            Universities

Telephones                                                                                       News stations

Telepathy                                                                                          Conglomerates (unless rock)

Landlines                                 nuclear power                               Boxes

Silver                                                                                                  Feeling fat

Gold                                                                                                    Bosses (some exceptions)

Night sky                                                                                            Industrial zones (?)

Black holes                                                                                         Pistons

Flower bulbs                                                                                      Weather reports

Industrial zones                                   war                                       War

Gas stations at night                                                                         Hair dryers, presidents

Ditches                                                                                                 No

Yes                                                      nuclear waste

Foxes                                                                                                    Gas stations during the day

…                                                                                                            …

One part of the symbol                                                                      stuck here on earth

The other part of the symbol                                                            at the lava vents chemo synthesizing

Another part of the symbol                                                               up there with the gods

like a piece of                                                                                        broken chalk

the fun (/sun) happens to be                                                             saturated on the same chain

as gold, roosters, lions                                                                        the heliotrope, sunstones

and                                                                                                          [gum…?]

Father Who

~Interlude~

It starts this way. In the dark. The descendant steps forward, looking up toward the ceiling as if searching for something, and we realize it is, in fact, already in progress. We enter a story in which the fathers have already wandered onto and off the stage. The chorus is already here.

Chorus leader

But how far can you carry your father? He’s pretty heavy.

Descendant

I can carry him past that tree. (Messenger has just placed a potted tree onstage)

Chorus

No, you can’t.

Descendant

Yes, I can!

Chorus

And I quote,

Chorus Leader

“Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’”

Chorus

How far can you carry your mother?

The Carrying Mothers and Fathers Event. Various fathers and mothers are carried or not carried by their child or children various distances like sacks of potatoes or in wheelbarrows live or on film, followed by The Carrying Grandmothers and Grandfathers Event.

as if we could bring the world into balance by ourselves

~End Father Who~

The Other Salon: In Gertrude Stein’s Livingroom

The first time I read Stein’s ventriloquizing Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I didn’t realize what was happening:

It was just about this time that Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora, rented an atelier in the rue de Fleurus. Raymond had just come back from his first trip to Greece and had brought back with him a greek girl and greek clothes.…now Raymond had gone completely greek and this included a greek girl.

Years later, when I had gathered a few facts, it dawned on me: Stein, so beloved of my poets, had mentioned my ancestors in her most famous book! The “greek girl” was my great great aunt Penelope! It was thrilling.

Then I read it again and, moon throwing its umbra across the sun, I was shamed. The nameless “girl” was “too modern a greek,” was trying to be a “little Parisian,” and her sister (my namesake, Eleni, I learned even later) was “a little actress.” Everything, down to the “g” of “Greek,” was diminutive in the genius’s assessment, while “Parisian” was grand. Stein reinscribed all the feelings I’d felt growing up with schoolmates with last names like Smith and first names like Suzy, relegating my ragtag probably poverty-stricken renegade ancestors to the hellholes of lowercase history. They really were losers after all.

Methods of Transmission

For a long time, we didn’t realize that frog eggs could receive and respond to messages. There you are, in a lump of viscous liquid that looks like dragon fruit flesh dotted with black seeds. If you’re one of the tiny seeds suspended in jelly, you can tell the difference between the patter of rain on the water’s surface and a snake’s chewing. You sense the world before you enter it. If a cat-eyed snake passes by, out to eat you, you feel it. You catch the message sent through earth or liquid, quickly hatch, and spiral away.

As a human, you most often gather seismic information through vibrating air. Those little dried apricots on each side of your head collect waves and funnel them in, amplifying the thump to knock insistently on the eardrum, setting the hammer pounding on the anvil, and there are stirrups, too. A tiny rider on her horse galloping with the waves. And then the ossicles move the snail-shaped cochlea, and that sets the tiny sea behind it humming, tickling the nerves, which fire messages off to your interested or disinterested brain. Go to bed! Mama commands through the doorway, and you’ve done all this to hear her and then block her out. But what if it’s a ghost speaking to you? Or a bat kol, a voice’s daughter traveling without body all the way from the sky? Our ancestors have no need of all this instrumentation, yet I am struggling to hear.

The Greek Girl (I Will Never Know What Song She Sang So I Imagine Alice Coltrane’s Harp)

When the notes left her mouth, I heard bodies rise from stones. The rustle of fabric sweeping across rock, soft scraping of fingertips on surfaces. I could hear the labyrinths laid out on the skin coming into contact with granite, small feathers of breath brush the throat as it sipped stripped air, wings skimming wet interior flesh. Fire salamanders breaking their skins first at the mouth then shedding it. Then the unoccupied noise of leaves clattering through air. The ancient air thickening.

From that never-ending crumbling ball of stone, Earth, the rocks rose, columns narrowed and filled: the shape of a waist. Breasts pushed through, hips rounded. The stones swelled with life.

We were in a huge amplifying cave and my thoughts got loud. I wanted to kiss her or to kiss the cave, my warm mouth on the opening or on the mouth that had just transformed marble to sound from empty air pulling through her throat, into the pillowing lungs, and exiting in the living shape of everything I had ever dreamed, even those shapes I hadn’t seen I had dreamed.

Could I sing it?

Methods of Transmission

Some animals can perceive vibrations in all manner of substrate, not just air or dirt or water: web or leaves or honeycomb. Often the scientists, who cannot perceive this type of information, don’t think to look for it. “We have encountered it, but we were not looking for it,” wrote one. If I had a vibrometer, I could convert the many vibrations into sound and try to decipher what was being said. I could read the pulse of the silk threads sliding and crossing in the loom. But the problems multiply, for of course to begin with, these vibrations don’t transmit across the years.

Of Gowns

On the first day, we wore brown, the color of the earth, the horsefly. On the second day, we changed to ocean teal, and wandered through the rooms.

Not everyone in this house is paying attention. I’m walking into the house in this ocean-hued gown and no one notices. What’s wrong with you? Come on! I thought it was at the moment of crisis, when my open mouth made no sound, that no one heard. But now I see it’s that there aren’t enough bodies gathered on the porch under the eaves with ears and mouths slack, bemused.

Your mouth hangs open like the cave entrance, darkened knowing poised at the back, where the muses do live. Where the muses will be honored. Enough mouths agape to change the world? Agapi: hanging open in wonder and in love. The moistening marriage-rite of the speaking mouth, where the rain falls and the fruit trees ripen.

Oh, but the World is the Mouth we shelter in. All fifty oceanids fit in here in their sea-colored silk, their hems dragging dolphins, squid, scarlet-colored crabs. The palate palace, the eating place, the feasting.

On the third day, we kept our ocean-colored gowns, and added more bright animals to the silk. The blunt-headed whale, the reaching octopus.

I wear the gown to the workplace where everyone is obsessed with this sliver of time, the one lodged in the current reddened flesh. I wear it to the workplace where the institution is always misremembering the worker. I wear it to the institution, which is the snake that eats itself without nutrient, even when shedding its own skin into its own mouth. The gown is my disguise; it has an ancient tail, new eyes, and a new mouth.

Then I was wondering, what is the difference between guise and disguise? I was hiding in a big old house making the motions of the educated middle class. First, I was told it was about action versus costume, about authenticity versus the unrevealed, then I was told the difference is temporal (you can take off a guise, while disguises always lead to catastrophe). Anyway, no single body could fit in all these closed eyes.

Come on! Pull the blue silk up around your waist, breast, push your arms in, run up and down the mountain with the slippery cloth caressing your swift, sleek legs! Walk this gown out into the open field!

She Took the Thread in Her Hands

(Having slayed the Minotaur and escaped the labyrinth by grace of the thread Ariadne gifted him)

This was the test. Ariadne had given Theseus the ball of yarn to find his way out of the labyrinth, but the art of crossing it was his to figure out alone. Twisting of plant fibers, the tying up of bundles. The fingers move swiftly in the stalks. Ariadne wept bitterly, for Theseus did not pass. She wove a memory substance with all the glimmer of a snail’s bejeweled slime, while his boat’s wake was just a trailing thread, Minotaur-colored flag fluttering like a dust mote in the distance.

THREAD EVENT

Each string each phrase each word each thing is uttered while the thread is passed.

She took the thread in her hands and twirled it.

She took the thread in her hands and tossed it in air.

She took the thread in her hands, washed it in salt waters by moonlight.

She took the thread in her hands and wove it from lip of sea through sea itself.

She took the thread in her hands and wrapped it around her lover and her love and her child and herself.

Unbinding this cluster, she took the thread in her hands and put it in a pan with branches and bark and leaves so fishes would be earth-fooled once the thread was a net.

She took the thread in her hands and called on it to get home, home how, how get.

What home. She took the thread in her hands and she knotted it.

She was done with waiting and crying and had her own kettles and shuttles to tend. She was working on something big. She learned from the cranes, the birds who invented the letter

Δ                                                                                                          (delta)

as they flew across the sky

and when the birds cross

X

for the first letter in the word χιάζω, chiasmus, meaning to shape like the letter X

To show where the heart of the matter lies.

When we are cross, we shut down. Or,

We can offer a thread for crossing over: This

Is how I feel: Angry at the fucked-up world. The receiver drops the ball. Or,

s/he carries it across, we express ourselves

To show where the sides of my argument and entity touch

Where the two bands that form the world’s soul cross (in ancient stories anyway)

So one thread doesn’t keep dancing right off the edge of the edge of the

Cliff

Night

World

X

to keep us from falling

apart

She saw how the fabric fell in folds on the old clay. The clay was hard and the folds were soft. A shoulder-drape in stone like a wing. Movement in the angle of the dog’s legs. She studied, she studied. Making the warp thread thicker, till she got the drape.

(Note: The pieces above are excerpts from Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal (City Lights Books))

(Images: Author with goat skull (Laird Hunt); and Penelope Duncan (née Sikelianou), holding her child Menalkas (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress))