A n n e W a l d m a n : K e e p i n g T h e W o r l d S a f e F o r P o e t r y

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 5 : S p e c i a l E d i t i o n

ELENI SIKELIANOS

On the Occasion of Anne Waldman’s 70^th Birthday

Our “healthy normal American Girl”

Great virtue

In the feet

—Archilochus

even her feet are famous

—Maureen Owen

Back away from that [she said]

that money on the tree

Must’ve been the muse talking

Look, Anne, all these poets peopling the trees!

come from your hand

and from your head

the letters of each word

made good the word bright

jaguar-eyed

you leapt

fully-formed in the poet tree, jaguary

shape sprawled on a limb, lying

in ambuscade

rushing — what?

Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,

war-stopping you’ll/she’ll leap––

as you know, poems

are as good as cats — agile, stealthy— but

to come back to the feet—

great virtue

in your shoes

wrote Archilochus, tho

his feet were near on naked

you sprang from 1, 2 heads, throwing the numbers around— 1-9-4-5, 2-0-1-5, as if

they were so many colors to gather from the skies,

pull down and lay before human bedlam, you

adorning the night

light-stepping thru

3,4

then 10 or 12 more

years as if they were iambs Did you know

trochee means running? You,

toward the complicated light

leaping light-toed but with weight enough

on each day in the line of the poem

36 lambs iamb around

lying down with 34 trochees slipping through time

69, 68 — now

you’ve got all those years to run back

& forth on! Each

syllable of each year/day lights up on its heaped hump

the way VIRTUE shines a light on

from the face down to the feet

balancing between πρόσωπον and πόδι

(why not

throw in a little Greek—

your mother married one)

sophrosyne and andreia

wielding/yielding force