Eleni Sikelianos - You animal machine : the golden Greek

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ALSO BY ELENI SIKELIANOS

BOOKS

The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead

Body Clock

The California Poem

The Book of Jon

The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls

Earliest Worlds

The Book of Tendons

To Speak While Dreaming

COPYRIGHT 2014 by Eleni Sikelianos

COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, .

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

Visit us at coffeehousepress.org.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Sikelianos, Eleni.

You animal machine : the golden Greek / by Eleni Sikelianos.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56689-364-0 (e-book)

1. Sikelianos, EleniFamily.

2. Poets, American20th centuryFamily relationships.

3. Greek Americans Biography.

I.Title.

PS3569.14128Z46 2014

811'.54DC23

[B]

2013035173

Excerpts have been previously published in Bombay Gin.

For my mother

and the other daughters of the Golden Greek

And for the Golden Greek

Contents

[N]o service is left to me but to bring an account to Your Majesty of the nine years I wandered through many very strange lands, lost and naked.

Cabeza de Vaca

There lies a den,

Beyond the seeming confines of the space

Made for the soul to wander in and trace

Its own existence

T HIS BOOK IS PART OF A LONGER FAMILY HISTORY, a circulatory system that encompasses morphine and heroin addicts, refugees, Ionian counts, one of the richest families in the United States who exhausted their fortune attempting to revive the ancient Greek theater, Lithuanian Jews, a half-dozen musicians, a painter, several poets (one a Nobel nominee) and lesbians, opium-runners, forgers, waitresses, tavern entertainers, a burlesque dancer called Melena the Leopard Girl (one of her many stage names), and a dwarf (one of her five husbands), all landed, eventually, on the coasts of our American homeland. It begins in lands and times we do not knowon the amber plains of Anatolia, under the golden light of Attica, in the shadows of the Black Forest, with ship-farers and wagsand snakes through the early reaches of recorded history on this continent, runs through Greek hash dens, Bohemian Europe and America, and crashes right into the average story of all those happy family plans gone awry.

I see the lines of our ancestors laid out in filaments looping here and there, bifurcating, disappearing; there are breaks in the thread and dead-ends into the dark where this or that sister took a boat from Greece and was lost forever from the fold; men and women who found each other or for reasons of circumstance were thrust into each others arms, radiating out along the great line in pairs; for however much they loved each other or same or other sexes or lived apart, always in this long arrow stretching back to our first humans hunting in the bush somewhere on a far continent in an inscrutable time, it was and is a man and a woman, two by two, each representing a small electrical hyphen of human intelligence and endeavor illuminating the path that leads to me sitting here; men and women, each with eyes lit up for at least one moment in their lives; loving each other in the dark before the advent of writing; or a brief encounter, maybe forced, that led to the continuation of a line; these packets of genes waiting, and that uncontrollable animal urge toward making thingslove, babies; the ranks moving forward and forward, branching, fucking, splitting, until they reach the edges of history; and forward, farther, till they hit the periphery of family lore.

Thus begins the tale before human time but in human terms, and stretches far beyond us into a future we cannot imagine, except, perhaps, that it will not contain us as walking libraries. It matters that there are holes in a family history that can never be filled, that there are secrets and mysteries, migrations and invasions and murky blood-lines. In this way we speak of human history.

The first portion of the tale was about my father, Jon.

This portion of the tale is about the other side: my grandmother, the Leopard Girl, the Golden Greek.

These stories were always in the room with us, vapory house gods seeping up from the carpet, flitting around the cupboards and corners, sparking off fingertips like flammable ice, an aura crackling and chuckling around the skin; our lares familiars, our deep inhabitants.

Story is not the right word. History is too vague. This is a net of family giftings, woven in darkly luminous filaments, the shirt daubed with Nessuss blood that scorches the skin, wounding the susceptibilities. But what is the key that turns the lock of the poison dress? Who is us? (Me and my mother.)

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