George Kalamaras
Other Things
Sometimes when I sleep, outside things enter me.
Last night it rained. I woke full of bleach.
The corona of a dead bird passes as knowledge.
We live as sparrows and resemble our pain.
Raw of gray morning.
Raven blood marking the scar of our sleep.
It takes me a long time to polish a mirror.
I keep considering the possibilities of other births.
Across the great water, my mother is a concubine in green corduroys.
She speaks by melting Patagonia ice.
Part of my scar has been mutilated into something beautiful.
They dropped concrete blocks onto the bodies of dead soldiers.
I have never and always. I have thirst for and have not parade.
They propped blocks of soot on the fallen bodies of bugs.
I have recorded the names of three insects I adore.
Recalcitrant. Suture. Winged bleed.
Ichnite
I’ve dreamt your broken clavicle as pure sound.
There are sumac leaves in the bowl, a hesitation, a qualm.
My yellow energetic house lingers amidst the sound of fallen lingerie.
You woke imprinted with a shirt full of bleached nostrils.
Okay. I am convinced my flesh makes me ache like a caught carp.
She stared at the bowl as if the swirling water somehow was home.
Do you know whether the withered deutzia derives compasses of snow?
Can you sleet my, leave open the wood-maybe of an enormous bid?
Throwing out your lust like dice is a rough galaxy.
Galaxy, as a metaphor, might mean a hardship of stretching?
I have lain flat, seen the x ray of her lower lip.
I am contained in what constrains her whale-bone corset.
A future of sea-lice? A kind acceptance as what if, but maybe not ever?
Remains in the thatched skirt suffocate the geese with snow.
When Vallejo was in jail, James Joyce was making life to a shadow of a wife.
To leap from sumac stem to Chinese cabbage fields is half a mulberry mood.
I pour water onto the head of every tired dead. Upon each sting. Ichor leaves.
Spaghetti-strapped breath measures the weight of breasts. Dreams my weeps.
Freshly Washed Blood
So, Andre Gide lit a bush fire that night in Bosoum, on his way to Fort
Archambault.
This was the early thirties, and still it feels like maybe tomorrow.
What lies in front of arriving at an unfinished library?
Where do we begin, and what do we need that we keep confidential,
even from ourselves?
And who says, because a particular child’s menstrual cycle gave sailors the
star-scraped path of navigation?
Among all the universal crises, how might the crown jewel of blanket sleep
infuse us with freshly washed blood?
I remember one life as a porter in Bosoum, hearing leopard yowl in the bush
faintly smelling of an even earlier birth as a plane tree shouldering
sunken moons.
What have I carried over all these centuries that I thought had been impossible
to kill?
Well now, a thunderous doorway might be the last moment I wear a shirt.
My mother was born in 1934. Where do I begin?
Adoration
I spent my butterfly years in the belly of a brown pheasant.
You can explore anything as long as you’re sincere.
Can we break a mirror and mean unexcited lightning?
Can we ask ourselves backwards how best to crawl into sleep?
The significance of a seven-year beetle infestation bottled in bed linen
suggests muslin wrapping the dead?
When the cave door opens, footfall becomes a divine rasp.
I was nonchalant about history, thinking a botched fiasco was an extraordinary
vision.
Because my moon taxi somehow recalled Dali, I drank its contents like stolen
rainwater.
He’s a contradiction locked in his own jaw.
When his wife screams adoration, they both bow down to themselves.
Perhaps I have collapsed on the new sofa cushion for a reason.
If you find it, fill my belly with unspoken game.