Your Kingdom

Always a poet to summon up our being in the world, Sikelianos (What I Knew) here directly addresses evolution to reveal our deep connectedness to the natural world, how “we clear a silent space where we are/ all bound together and leafing from the same root.” In a space now “overblooming with us,” she makes us feel our bodies, “the neat meat// hiding under the table of the skin’s tablature,” the primordial link of a fox’s tongue to ours, with our feet like flippers, our “fingers ghosting chimp as they slender through air,” our very neurons “dangling like a/ participle” and ultimately leading back to “the salamander you.” But she doesn’t lose the sense of mystery, seeing this kingdom less as rigid tree than loose, soft net and rejecting easy reductionism (as when “a bear/ crept out of a word, [and] a word/ did its work/ to erase the bear”). This is not a science lecture, even as the poet visits the Museum of Comparative Anatomy; instead, there’s a sense of the delight she wants to share, a sort of liquid urgency, even a joyous goofiness (“I want to be wrong all day long”).