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George
Kalamaras
George
Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort
Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of five books of
poetry, three of which are full-length, Even
the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders
My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The
Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four
Way Books Intro Series. His poems have appeared in many journals and
anthologies including Best American Poetry 1997, The
Bitter Oleander, Boulevard, Denver Quarterly (forthcoming), Hambone,
The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Sulfur, TriQuarterly,
and others. He is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001),
and first prize in the 1998 Abiko
Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan).
The Caves of Chalcocite
I say don’t taint the chalaza of the egg with either membrane or yolk.
Keep me far from dichotomy in the caves of chalcocite.
To those who expect a blood transfusion, each time it’s Saturn—not the
Sudan—that returns.
This New Year’s Eve it was closer to earth than it has ever been.
I look up at the vast method of my calculation.
I recall Tagonrog, mining copper near the shores of the Sea of Azoz.
Yes, I know something of having previously lived.
Don’t believe your parents if they say you can only choose a Chevy or a Ford.
When the agony of any human breathing becomes too much, the teacher
arrives.
There are seven doors in the nerve ganglia of the spine, each with an egg,
waiting for a delicate, not-so-gentle knock.
With Other Properties
Now we come to the passage of time.
I kiss her forelocks. I barley my swamp with soup.
So many haunting narrators pluralize my voice.
I am no longer Cesare Pavese, no longer a singular scowl of nouns.
With other properties, a perverse immersion yields the blood-salt of a taut
frenzy.
We wanted the pocket watch—not bees in the vest—as one way to hide time.
Give me an oceanic gauze if you understand.
Sting ray my breathing. Shark mouth my weight.
We carry with us more than a sugary wafer.
We try to pass it off as a mouth-watering jewel.
Crunch a diamond, and the entire canal fills with starlight.
I have waited many lives to ferry across that sky.
Each Time
When I drained my arm of wet loose language, only the gasp remained.
It was a lot like breathing, but hidden, more insidious.
That yak skull voiced through my chest is a comfort-hunger.
Why did they bind your feet, even though it was my hand that was bandaged?
The urine around a lily is a howling clock of morning advice.
No, I want to sleep and not erase my dream.
A little like collecting bones.
When your breathing arrives well after itself I am revolved.
Across the lights of a celibate town, a sliver of slippers shifts like a great
shipwreck.
I have been born in Madagascar more than once, and each time I am
miraculously alive.
Sleeping Next to One Another, We Inherit Baggage from Outside Our Past
We exchange sleep masks and enter one another’s dream.
I wear a left ear plug, you a right.
The pulverized Zaire trains shape more than grain.
You slip from the ship’s helm. I am there to catch you.
If you asked me for a gesture of blood, I might sneeze onto your hanky.
But by the proper name for breadfruit, we agree to ghost-roam for anguishing
evidence.
Under an impossible aviary, we all crawl the dirt, searching for the teachings
of lice.
You fold your basilisk and decode the goodness.
It is snowing, and it is Saturday.
I will make a soup of Swiss chard, tofu, and adzuki beans.
Before we wake, run through the inflexible sea-monsters of my quickly-silting
sleep.
I promise to honor you and to be true, and to exchange the gadrooned fluids of
dreams with no one else but you.
copyright © George Kalamaras
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