George Kalamaras
5 poems
**
Next Island from Borneo
There is a corpse of Saturn in charge of my blood.
Here, ignite the living and the dread in a copse of trees in the Balkans.
The next island over from Borneo is called, Next Island from Borneo.
Sit on my right and see how they might rename my left.
Call me Nikolai. Call me Dhimitri. Color means never having to say green is
........green.
Let’s read the bones and wet our friendship.
We hold the beach flea in our mouth in a sacred, almost Russian, way.
We hope to say its locution is not preserved in vodka, is not easily bemused.
Determine me this; nonplus me my that.
We complete the sometimes-confused work of inner excavation precisely
........three days, three hours, three minutes, and two and two-thirds seconds
........before we leave the body. One death at a time.
**
If There’s Salt in the Loloma Goldmine, Touch the Photo With What is Alive
Illnesses come and go, not with their languages but as if lost dialects urged us
........home.
The Loloma goldmine touched a chosen bit of what had largely been opinion.
The pronunciation of the letter G was similar to saying K, but was something I
........could never quite muster.
Flung of my imagined tongue, you are full of my sturdy delight.
I swear I mastered the journey to Suva, but it required a complete
........understanding of our possible death.
Things in advance prance backward through layers of what we hope to
........observe, like the interior of a foreign hotel sunken thirteen floors shy.
Out-of-pocket expenses may include the sniffles, the chills, even a ruinous
........nose.
As long as we don’t suddenly die, we are all pretty much alive.
Sometimes in the evening, I examine old family photos by touching them with
........every part of me that is not sexual.
The challenge is how to decide whether the sleepy child, the boy with the
........golden aura and squinty eye, will one day wake, one day survive.
**
The Immigrant Crease
Now we come to the study of tear ducts under the brow bone, behind the
........upper eyelid.
We come to corpse dust; we come to punctum and lacrimal; we come to
........bitter-my-thinking.
We inherit, from wind, the condition of dropsy.
Though the townsfolk awake, rich volcanic lapse begins to flee.
I have been spoken backwards in all you have erupted.
And though we Krakatoa, though we even Aime Cesaire, our discourse
........somehow becomes whole, and we indeed the belching fire and swollen
........abdomen and safety-net our mouths.
Fishermen, please, if you will, the sea plant and sacred breeze.
We somehow and get-got strong in felling an oceanic tree.
Yes, our childhood is a vast stack of cordwood.
Sure, grant me Batavian citizenry to rid me of all pains Greek.
Teach me not to say rigney but oregano.
Slap me my correction, let me feel the immigrant crease; 1956 me into
........something as disturbing as English, as the Greek word for turd.
Whatever the risks, the two sides of a Sudanese ocean, posing as an ardent
........desert march, might explain this persistent scrotal itch.
Whatever the risk, salve this adult talk whole, sieve it through rain, hand it
........back as mainstreamed smoke through an uncertain hand, as baklava
........broken with honey, potentially bakeable as any other Ionian decree.
**
I Refuse to Wash the Salt
To go back to you would be impossible.
To actually eat the fire ant, a kind of eclectic shame.
From blueprints pressed in snow, the boards of a mapless house.
Hand me the Spanish lamp, and I will Galicia, I will sea salt and Namibia.
A man or a woman’s voice.
The functional rendezvous of a stroked scrotum.
I do not color-swim your finger, even in the piracy of my adult imagination.
I refuse to wash the salt, and with it, all the small depths of my hand.
Only the marvelous is able to exalt the sensual food with which I bleed.
The real is rarely audible, at least in suspicious private talk; blindness—I tell
........you—is another form of forgiving.
When I was six, I mistakenly killed an ant I’d earlier given my Christian
........name.
I swear, it is too easy to call me sad, sad goldfish fin, to examine the
........disappearance of a court astrologer as indicative of permissible prosperity.
So, the fire ants of Namibia are forever implanted as pathways in my chest?
So, sea lice in the dog’s ear are a moist manner of mouth?
To go back to the royal dwelling, replacing snow with the salt-slash of burnt
........furniture, is not possible.
To return to you—in all its repress—the fire ant biting red my wrist would be
........certainly irresponsible, ravenously pure.
**
With Each Word
Now that I effortless the landscape, now that my language of faraway timothy
........grass surrenders in me all that is arc.
Now that I foreign my death, now that I sound like but shift.
I was standing on the deck of the White Noise.
I took a trick at the wheel.
The land rose up like a white man barely aware of his privilege.
The cruel salt breeze pleased even the scar in my pants pocket.
But my longing to live a life of dogs, to mush of it and Jack London my pipe
........on a cold winter night the length of a season, did nothing to calm my dark.
There were cannibals, I heard, and they kept me wandering the periphery of
........the island of Malekula while they hunted wild pigs, kept me aware of
........every shade of yes and no, dark and blight.
Even a willow shelter and the medicine-wide watcher approached the plateau
........of cane-grass with respect.
Even the worst count of whooping cough, or seeing a coconut split open like a
........human head.
Now that milk threats and effortless and speech and all I might surrender unto.
Now the familiarity of a foreign deck, of a binary world gone wrong.
Now the shell shards and the bringing me back to eating myself.
Now the time and again—with each word, each thread, each, from inside out,
........from inside in.
**
return to sawbuck 3.4
**
George Kalamaras has published ten books of poetry (including five chapbooks). Recent titles are Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2009), Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees, with paintings by Alvaro Cardona-Hine (Stockport Flats, 2009), and The Recumbent Galaxy, co-authored with Cardona-Hine and winner of the 2009 C & R Press Open Competition. He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
These poems of George’s appear in The Recumbent Galaxy, a co-authored conversation of poems by George Kalamaras and Alvaro Cardona-Hine (C & R Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 C & R Press Open Competition.
**
Next Island from Borneo
There is a corpse of Saturn in charge of my blood.
Here, ignite the living and the dread in a copse of trees in the Balkans.
The next island over from Borneo is called, Next Island from Borneo.
Sit on my right and see how they might rename my left.
Call me Nikolai. Call me Dhimitri. Color means never having to say green is
........green.
Let’s read the bones and wet our friendship.
We hold the beach flea in our mouth in a sacred, almost Russian, way.
We hope to say its locution is not preserved in vodka, is not easily bemused.
Determine me this; nonplus me my that.
We complete the sometimes-confused work of inner excavation precisely
........three days, three hours, three minutes, and two and two-thirds seconds
........before we leave the body. One death at a time.
**
If There’s Salt in the Loloma Goldmine, Touch the Photo With What is Alive
Illnesses come and go, not with their languages but as if lost dialects urged us
........home.
The Loloma goldmine touched a chosen bit of what had largely been opinion.
The pronunciation of the letter G was similar to saying K, but was something I
........could never quite muster.
Flung of my imagined tongue, you are full of my sturdy delight.
I swear I mastered the journey to Suva, but it required a complete
........understanding of our possible death.
Things in advance prance backward through layers of what we hope to
........observe, like the interior of a foreign hotel sunken thirteen floors shy.
Out-of-pocket expenses may include the sniffles, the chills, even a ruinous
........nose.
As long as we don’t suddenly die, we are all pretty much alive.
Sometimes in the evening, I examine old family photos by touching them with
........every part of me that is not sexual.
The challenge is how to decide whether the sleepy child, the boy with the
........golden aura and squinty eye, will one day wake, one day survive.
**
The Immigrant Crease
Now we come to the study of tear ducts under the brow bone, behind the
........upper eyelid.
We come to corpse dust; we come to punctum and lacrimal; we come to
........bitter-my-thinking.
We inherit, from wind, the condition of dropsy.
Though the townsfolk awake, rich volcanic lapse begins to flee.
I have been spoken backwards in all you have erupted.
And though we Krakatoa, though we even Aime Cesaire, our discourse
........somehow becomes whole, and we indeed the belching fire and swollen
........abdomen and safety-net our mouths.
Fishermen, please, if you will, the sea plant and sacred breeze.
We somehow and get-got strong in felling an oceanic tree.
Yes, our childhood is a vast stack of cordwood.
Sure, grant me Batavian citizenry to rid me of all pains Greek.
Teach me not to say rigney but oregano.
Slap me my correction, let me feel the immigrant crease; 1956 me into
........something as disturbing as English, as the Greek word for turd.
Whatever the risks, the two sides of a Sudanese ocean, posing as an ardent
........desert march, might explain this persistent scrotal itch.
Whatever the risk, salve this adult talk whole, sieve it through rain, hand it
........back as mainstreamed smoke through an uncertain hand, as baklava
........broken with honey, potentially bakeable as any other Ionian decree.
**
I Refuse to Wash the Salt
To go back to you would be impossible.
To actually eat the fire ant, a kind of eclectic shame.
From blueprints pressed in snow, the boards of a mapless house.
Hand me the Spanish lamp, and I will Galicia, I will sea salt and Namibia.
A man or a woman’s voice.
The functional rendezvous of a stroked scrotum.
I do not color-swim your finger, even in the piracy of my adult imagination.
I refuse to wash the salt, and with it, all the small depths of my hand.
Only the marvelous is able to exalt the sensual food with which I bleed.
The real is rarely audible, at least in suspicious private talk; blindness—I tell
........you—is another form of forgiving.
When I was six, I mistakenly killed an ant I’d earlier given my Christian
........name.
I swear, it is too easy to call me sad, sad goldfish fin, to examine the
........disappearance of a court astrologer as indicative of permissible prosperity.
So, the fire ants of Namibia are forever implanted as pathways in my chest?
So, sea lice in the dog’s ear are a moist manner of mouth?
To go back to the royal dwelling, replacing snow with the salt-slash of burnt
........furniture, is not possible.
To return to you—in all its repress—the fire ant biting red my wrist would be
........certainly irresponsible, ravenously pure.
**
With Each Word
Now that I effortless the landscape, now that my language of faraway timothy
........grass surrenders in me all that is arc.
Now that I foreign my death, now that I sound like but shift.
I was standing on the deck of the White Noise.
I took a trick at the wheel.
The land rose up like a white man barely aware of his privilege.
The cruel salt breeze pleased even the scar in my pants pocket.
But my longing to live a life of dogs, to mush of it and Jack London my pipe
........on a cold winter night the length of a season, did nothing to calm my dark.
There were cannibals, I heard, and they kept me wandering the periphery of
........the island of Malekula while they hunted wild pigs, kept me aware of
........every shade of yes and no, dark and blight.
Even a willow shelter and the medicine-wide watcher approached the plateau
........of cane-grass with respect.
Even the worst count of whooping cough, or seeing a coconut split open like a
........human head.
Now that milk threats and effortless and speech and all I might surrender unto.
Now the familiarity of a foreign deck, of a binary world gone wrong.
Now the shell shards and the bringing me back to eating myself.
Now the time and again—with each word, each thread, each, from inside out,
........from inside in.
**
return to sawbuck 3.4
**
George Kalamaras has published ten books of poetry (including five chapbooks). Recent titles are Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2009), Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees, with paintings by Alvaro Cardona-Hine (Stockport Flats, 2009), and The Recumbent Galaxy, co-authored with Cardona-Hine and winner of the 2009 C & R Press Open Competition. He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
These poems of George’s appear in The Recumbent Galaxy, a co-authored conversation of poems by George Kalamaras and Alvaro Cardona-Hine (C & R Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 C & R Press Open Competition.
Labels: 3.4, george kalamaras, winter 2009/2010
