George Kalamaras
BORDER OF YES, CONTUSION OF NO
Yes, my childhood hurt.
But whose did not? What birth—even hatching from the egg—is not a fierce form of mending?
Mist of inmost regret.
I regret that I have not regretted you enough.
There is an unanswered letter on my desk.
It is either G or K, or perhaps some yet-to-be-discovered vowel on which I have based my life.
The woman with blonde hair had many years of the very dark.
Nothing is truer than paradox. We often move through the world—as if it were the
world—with the fanning brilliance of a peacock’s plaintive plea.
I HAVE EXAMINED YOUR BURNING BIRD
I have examined your burning bird and bring you the ground of African drumming.
I realize that what singes my throat has more to do with my past than with the future of your shoes.
To whom shall I say, The echo of Chinese pyramids reverberates in the sea lice of Spain?
To whom shall I relinquish this flea?
I have grown up, physically, and am now past sixty.
There are many mysteries of pyramids and fleas, each somehow found in ancient Chi’ang
lute notes, in Andalusian dance, in deafening generations of djembe ground vibrating,
still, in the soul’s eaves.
Once, when we wake below the rivers—the Congo, the Molindi—every particular of owl
resin will expand our chests.
Don’t get perturbed with this confusion of tense. One eye at a time, the orange-heavy
moon will drop its slow-burning pearl into the stunned, sinking sun.
It is always the same when past and future contrive.
Alternate nostril breathing is one way to calm the sound.
I have heard the burning bird, examined a nameless clock of a great tourist hotel that
ticks minutes past all dichotomy.
There is a kitchen in Bolivia with French cuisine. I am Greek and want a plate of
dandelion greens with lemon, oil, and the great dark silt of everything that time has
ever lost. That time has ceased to release.
CUT
Amaurotic hour of snow.
Ambage of blood lending oxygen one thought at a time.
The sound of dentures trying to speak trapped in a glass.
Exaggerated underwater nouns when we talk to one another with a lamp.
All this. And frost and snow.
All this. And saltpeter in the belly of an elk.
How much of me has fallen, one haunch at a time?
Poor thing human language cannot possibly describe.
Frightful coat hanger in my room, doing everything the soul resists.
It hangs there, solitary, holding only the body of the day.
Prop of the hour, lean upon me for a change.
Each time I am reborn, the yogi said, taking on a body is like putting on an old overcoat.
If a poisonous tango were to revoke my fever?
If a malarial yellow, if an Amazonian breast and how the missing one means strength?
If the photograph of a happy family dissolves?
If the doubtful river digs for cut, horizontal bones?
If the blue. The inevitable blue.
If the clear evident blue.
WILL YOU NOT KISS ME?
After mastering the breath, we come to know every birth, each in proper order.
The deserts of Tartary in 1844 are an escorted situation.
It is said that Prince Shotoku created this Buddhist nunnery in 600 C.E.
But this is the unreliable history, more like a wall of cross-legged images partially
smeared with candle soot and incense.
Trying to ask my face the weight of two crows confuses the mirror.
I hold up two fingers and fear the butcher, even his russet mushroom.
Will you not kiss me and abruptly advance my requiem?
The breathing nucellus shepherds a jackal into and out of my open chest.
A most unexpected breath may occident my raincoat.
It might compass-mouth my ear, with or without your maritime tongue.
At the end of the sea-lesions, I found a remarkable intimacy.
After months afloat, I was still craving your breath against my chest. My mouth moved
on demand, and I never knew the darkness of your blind voluptuous eclipse.
EACH OF SEVEN MONTHS
Take care not to extract the carbon from my lower lip.
It is the best I can do with the Miró painting you scarred.
For a long time, the color of my fear was green. My grief, a warm saffron.
Once a month, I bit raw carrots, washed okra, and assumed every Japanese vegetable was medicinal.
I cut out the picture of the zebra you sent and made a collage.
I included the words aching and childhurt at its jail-cell underbelly.
Sure, I restored the message on the answering machine.
Now it simply says, Hello, we’re not home, but here’s the vulnerable coat of the foal.
You say the magazine arrived from Bhutan, that you have beaten four of my poems for breakfast.
Careful, please, to heal their bruise. Burn them with kerosene, giving the ash to seven
women on each day of the week, on the seventh month of the seventh year lying there
on the tender tough of the tongue’s torn.
WELL SHORT
Well short of complete emotional maturity, I pick a scab.
Its soft brown blood is a tired god whose gratings fall in shavings to cover my awful and
my hurt.
Sure, I have bathed several times a week these past years, searching for a way to soften my lives.
Yes, my mother is a Pisces, as was her mother, and even my father’s, and now it appears
I have Pisces ascendant in my stream.
So it turns out the circle of lightning is not really a circle? That I have lived not in the
estuary of an eel in heat but in an enlivening swamp?
It turns out the jagged branch continuously reaching toward me is electric beyond repair?
When mosquitoes bite the bottom of my heart, I know the moon has turned.
When the dreams of Zulu and Umbete rake their coals unknowingly through my night-
sweats, it appears we’ve all been massacred in massacring—just in thought—a
command of legionary ants.
This frightening blood-broom is something to pick at, to blur.
Mute falling away of road dust. The owl clocking its neck, shaking off my rage. A swan
measuring my one good breath, circling the pond again and again.
THE ONE I NAMED
That year the seal hunt proved overly unproductive.
I had left Kwangchow two lifetimes back, somehow crossed the Bering Straits without a
footbridge, coming into the womb of another possibility.
Let’s arrange a few moist phrases to see what we have.
Let’s start with flensing the seal skin, with the yelping of excited dogs, with a
menstruating woman on the birthing rug is said to be dangerous to a child about to be
born.
Look at the stars and count your life backwards into nothing but color.
Black, white. Black, white. Black, white, white, white.
I know. There is short notice of a told apotheosis in my expected.
The figure eight of my heart is not a giant epoxy-resin statue of Mao.
Such tongue bumps gave me pause.
It was not typhus, at least not typhus of any tongue I grew.
I cleared my throat, built a neighborhood entirely of caribou skin and snow.
I looked at my star—marked on my forehead all the way from the womb—felt its kinship
pull calling me The one who named me, the one I named.
Yes, my childhood hurt.
But whose did not? What birth—even hatching from the egg—is not a fierce form of mending?
Mist of inmost regret.
I regret that I have not regretted you enough.
There is an unanswered letter on my desk.
It is either G or K, or perhaps some yet-to-be-discovered vowel on which I have based my life.
The woman with blonde hair had many years of the very dark.
Nothing is truer than paradox. We often move through the world—as if it were the
world—with the fanning brilliance of a peacock’s plaintive plea.
I HAVE EXAMINED YOUR BURNING BIRD
I have examined your burning bird and bring you the ground of African drumming.
I realize that what singes my throat has more to do with my past than with the future of your shoes.
To whom shall I say, The echo of Chinese pyramids reverberates in the sea lice of Spain?
To whom shall I relinquish this flea?
I have grown up, physically, and am now past sixty.
There are many mysteries of pyramids and fleas, each somehow found in ancient Chi’ang
lute notes, in Andalusian dance, in deafening generations of djembe ground vibrating,
still, in the soul’s eaves.
Once, when we wake below the rivers—the Congo, the Molindi—every particular of owl
resin will expand our chests.
Don’t get perturbed with this confusion of tense. One eye at a time, the orange-heavy
moon will drop its slow-burning pearl into the stunned, sinking sun.
It is always the same when past and future contrive.
Alternate nostril breathing is one way to calm the sound.
I have heard the burning bird, examined a nameless clock of a great tourist hotel that
ticks minutes past all dichotomy.
There is a kitchen in Bolivia with French cuisine. I am Greek and want a plate of
dandelion greens with lemon, oil, and the great dark silt of everything that time has
ever lost. That time has ceased to release.
CUT
Amaurotic hour of snow.
Ambage of blood lending oxygen one thought at a time.
The sound of dentures trying to speak trapped in a glass.
Exaggerated underwater nouns when we talk to one another with a lamp.
All this. And frost and snow.
All this. And saltpeter in the belly of an elk.
How much of me has fallen, one haunch at a time?
Poor thing human language cannot possibly describe.
Frightful coat hanger in my room, doing everything the soul resists.
It hangs there, solitary, holding only the body of the day.
Prop of the hour, lean upon me for a change.
Each time I am reborn, the yogi said, taking on a body is like putting on an old overcoat.
If a poisonous tango were to revoke my fever?
If a malarial yellow, if an Amazonian breast and how the missing one means strength?
If the photograph of a happy family dissolves?
If the doubtful river digs for cut, horizontal bones?
If the blue. The inevitable blue.
If the clear evident blue.
WILL YOU NOT KISS ME?
After mastering the breath, we come to know every birth, each in proper order.
The deserts of Tartary in 1844 are an escorted situation.
It is said that Prince Shotoku created this Buddhist nunnery in 600 C.E.
But this is the unreliable history, more like a wall of cross-legged images partially
smeared with candle soot and incense.
Trying to ask my face the weight of two crows confuses the mirror.
I hold up two fingers and fear the butcher, even his russet mushroom.
Will you not kiss me and abruptly advance my requiem?
The breathing nucellus shepherds a jackal into and out of my open chest.
A most unexpected breath may occident my raincoat.
It might compass-mouth my ear, with or without your maritime tongue.
At the end of the sea-lesions, I found a remarkable intimacy.
After months afloat, I was still craving your breath against my chest. My mouth moved
on demand, and I never knew the darkness of your blind voluptuous eclipse.
EACH OF SEVEN MONTHS
Take care not to extract the carbon from my lower lip.
It is the best I can do with the Miró painting you scarred.
For a long time, the color of my fear was green. My grief, a warm saffron.
Once a month, I bit raw carrots, washed okra, and assumed every Japanese vegetable was medicinal.
I cut out the picture of the zebra you sent and made a collage.
I included the words aching and childhurt at its jail-cell underbelly.
Sure, I restored the message on the answering machine.
Now it simply says, Hello, we’re not home, but here’s the vulnerable coat of the foal.
You say the magazine arrived from Bhutan, that you have beaten four of my poems for breakfast.
Careful, please, to heal their bruise. Burn them with kerosene, giving the ash to seven
women on each day of the week, on the seventh month of the seventh year lying there
on the tender tough of the tongue’s torn.
WELL SHORT
Well short of complete emotional maturity, I pick a scab.
Its soft brown blood is a tired god whose gratings fall in shavings to cover my awful and
my hurt.
Sure, I have bathed several times a week these past years, searching for a way to soften my lives.
Yes, my mother is a Pisces, as was her mother, and even my father’s, and now it appears
I have Pisces ascendant in my stream.
So it turns out the circle of lightning is not really a circle? That I have lived not in the
estuary of an eel in heat but in an enlivening swamp?
It turns out the jagged branch continuously reaching toward me is electric beyond repair?
When mosquitoes bite the bottom of my heart, I know the moon has turned.
When the dreams of Zulu and Umbete rake their coals unknowingly through my night-
sweats, it appears we’ve all been massacred in massacring—just in thought—a
command of legionary ants.
This frightening blood-broom is something to pick at, to blur.
Mute falling away of road dust. The owl clocking its neck, shaking off my rage. A swan
measuring my one good breath, circling the pond again and again.
THE ONE I NAMED
That year the seal hunt proved overly unproductive.
I had left Kwangchow two lifetimes back, somehow crossed the Bering Straits without a
footbridge, coming into the womb of another possibility.
Let’s arrange a few moist phrases to see what we have.
Let’s start with flensing the seal skin, with the yelping of excited dogs, with a
menstruating woman on the birthing rug is said to be dangerous to a child about to be
born.
Look at the stars and count your life backwards into nothing but color.
Black, white. Black, white. Black, white, white, white.
I know. There is short notice of a told apotheosis in my expected.
The figure eight of my heart is not a giant epoxy-resin statue of Mao.
Such tongue bumps gave me pause.
It was not typhus, at least not typhus of any tongue I grew.
I cleared my throat, built a neighborhood entirely of caribou skin and snow.
I looked at my star—marked on my forehead all the way from the womb—felt its kinship
pull calling me The one who named me, the one I named.