Eleni Sikelianos & Cliff Yates
April 2010
ES
Charlene Dream
Everyone is the weather of our home star
Enclose the future in your liver
With the audacity of a jewel trap
The future where there’s nothing left
Charlene
your hair was
a tall girl, big girl blonde as cigarette smoke
You had a boat by the river, New York, little boat tied to the banks
a wooden ship of luxury because freedom
is You could float away, come home
float away, come
home
without the weight of your own actions
ripping the organs out of your body
Charlene
the body holds the vowels like a baby arming the “O”
sideways U the future shape of the liver
blue U liver
why U
Charlene
Kidney’s emerald
Light blue Charlene
Eat your bowl of money
CY
Boat
in the morning she found a boat marooned on her pillow
she couldn’t hear the survivors
she couldn’t hear the sea
the boat on the back of her hand, the size of a shell, and light
she glimpsed it again through a window at work
holding up the traffic on the by-pass
she could barely hear the typewriters
for the noise of the storm
in her head…
more land than sea
birds and more birds, a crow
on the topmost roof, the door onto the balcony…
the cloud-sized boat capsized in the evening sky
the wide open sky, everything piled beneath it
she rocked and she rocked asleep and awake
to the crashing of waves
ES
What she found
In the boat near her head: Rope, tweezers, a sea more standard than un In the boat near her hand: Three freckles left by the boatswain, feckless These she tipped out of both boats, she tipped Over and out, both boats Looking one to the other Across a swanky abyss
CY
Foot
In the boat near her foot, a young man in pyjamas with a voice like Edgar Allen Poe
a man who looked like an overcoat with a pale face, waterproof pyjamas and a wide hat the smell of garlic from the boat near her foot cooked in butter the foot with the toe and the scars orange and white like a Penguin Classic
Less blemishes than art, less art... like preparing a meal – breaded mushrooms and garlic
You can't not do anything about this she decided but did nothing anyway and waited for the inevitable the storm over Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, climbing the rigging...
See – she knew all the words they were in her blood, swimming around
ES
If it had been Pound and not Poe If he had been wearing swim trunks not pyjamas If it had been booze and not butter If it had been breakfast not dinner And Venice not Nantucket It would have been Pound’s pale thighs in the sunlight, thigh hairs curled like little snails (poils or escargots) Charlene coughed.
CY
he stirs, shakes his head it rattles
like a bucket of snails found in the lettuce after a night of rain
a bucket like the bucket on deck slopping now
as he shakes his head sailing for Rapallo where Pound fed meat to the mythical cat sailing for Europe a raven in the cage swinging from the masthead