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(SECOND HOURS RESIDUE) (public)

Chasing a minute inside an hours burrow — the second-elec

trons knocking off the burrows

sides

a piece of an hour I mean

this piece of its index is

equipped

with ratios, reasons

old as I look, says the hour,

speaking through a woman at the counter

I would like this petal-edge of the hour to reassemble a ranunculus, to

white out portions of the hour that please us less Stand back and

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look at this hour its hands waving at the out, out edges

would I if I could perfect an hour? I see the seeds dripping

from this hour jog-bear, a girl says

because I did not properly attend to it this hour has turned

tubular & wooly

someone sits next to me I begin to feel self-conscious about my hour as one would a blackened egg

These vs are for victory how

an hour prevailed They are for birds peeling off the hours surface They are

the hours thorns decorating the hours rose

the hand aches inside the hour

as if the hour were an oven

breaking the hands bones

Weve graduated to hours.

And the folds between minutes.

The crumpled folds between hours.

They keep adding dimensions to space not time. Why? The folds

the felt folds why the folds between minutes and hours.

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You may wish to mention the old boogers in the bathtub. (No thanks.)

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The night line descends

carcajou you

wolverine

of night

an hour an iron collar relaxing

into the undone

threads night nights itself

a morning, an hour arrives tense as streetlights reflected in raingutters

an hour shines like a wound

the debris of hours accumulated in the face an hour

like a wrecking ball an hour

in mid demolition a pirouette, performance, an

hour smashing, wounding the face

You speak only of an hours demolition.

Here, spicules were built. Assembled

into a needle-like house. Transparent. Airy. Gorgeous. Constructed

to withstand all time.

What? says Body.

Constructed to withstand all time. Not even the mind

can construct time

outside of time.

* * *

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of one book of nonfiction and five books of poetry, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. Her poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Arabic, Romanian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Serbian, and a selected poems (De L’histoire, du soleil, de la vision) appeared in French this fall. Forthcoming in the fall of 2008 is a new book of poems, Body Clock. Sikelianos has translated poems from the Greek and the French, as well as, in with scholars or native-language poets, the Chinese and the Russian. Among the numerous awards she has received for her poetry, nonfiction and translations are a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Fulbright Arts Fellowship, The National Poetry Series, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award. Sikelianos received her MFA in 1991 from what was then The Naropa Institute, where she studied with many of the most exuberant living poets of our times. She currently lives in Colorado with the novelist Laird Hunt and their daughter Eva Grace; and she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver.