Eleni Sikelianos

if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing who developed eyes for you agape in open waters the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you