Eleni Sikelianos

Once, in my twenties, I was in Paris standing on the Pont des Arts, looking at the Pont Neuf and its reflection in the river, when I suddenly realized for the first time that they were two different things. How could it have taken me so many years to understand such a simple thing? Generally speaking, I had always seen the reflection and the bridge as a glittering circle. Maybe it’s a kind of fuzzy-headed foolishness. But maybe it’s part of the dream we must slip back into to keep ourselves from dissecting, extracting and destroying everything around us. I have, my whole life, felt a continuum between me and the things around me. Some might call it a boundary issue. But this permeability is what has allowed me to experience fennel stalks and monarch caterpillars as part of my being, mine in communication with theirs. Atomically speaking, the water and the bridge are of a piece. The reflection puts us in another space — a release of energy — still atomic if we trace it, I guess — it’s in the real space of the imagination. I’ve spent the last seven years working on poems that celebrate our morphological, genetic, and behavioral continuity with other animals (Your Kingdom). And none of us would be here without the plants! The beings that allow us not only to exist but to converse corporeally with stars… 

Some think of language as a betrayal, the reflection we mistake for the bridge, but I often experience it as part of the continuum. We most certainly learned sounds from our bodily interactions with the plants and rocks and animals around us. From the snapping of twigs, we learned “t” and “k”. I am writing against disconnection and erasure of mystery. I am writing for the future, for living, and for the dead.