George Kalamaras
The Meticulous Mice of the Lantern-Lathed Tongue
I remember that birth during the Edo period. The smell of horse lather. Of ruts in the
road. Of women squatting in the field and men relieving themselves against a wall.
In those days everyone’s hair was on fire.
The emptiness the deutzia bushes breathed into me was a sack of fine flour.
Someone spoke in words that resembled thinly laid noodles.
Another spoke as if a tree was continuously in bloom.
Someone removed her ear and laid it on a plate of ash.
Then it was as if time stood running.
As if, still, the world was revolving around the moon.
As if time itself was time.
And the lanterns in the heart blazed in ways from which even the horses sank.
Lord knows, the time of the tongue was the time of the tongue.
Lord knows, there was an owl on fire inside the nightmares of tiny twitching mice among
the kerosene cuts of the world.
In those days I feared I had only one birth to endure, fashioning silk and a finely shaved
leg from every breath I shook.
I looked to the feet of the dishonored women in the red quarter in Yoshiwara as if they
stood for something others could not see. As if they were my life.
Traveling North
They would nudge me as if I was a methodical man.
I suspected this contempt, a cigarette clothed in ravenous squalls of snow.
I didn’t need healing.
I didn’t require their pity.
I needed a word, pure—for once—as the driven alphabet.
Place the p of panache anywhere in a word, perhaps at the back to give it pop, or plop,
or even chomp.
When you approach the Pole, even the compass of its own letters goes mad.
Watch, with awe, the needle of my life go blind.
Did I say I didn’t need healing?
Would you pity me, please, for pitying no one but me?
So it is that the blood flow from my heart is a walrus wailing at the air hole from the
strike of the harpoon, the taper of the seal-oil lamp sooting the roof of that which I
most crave.
The texture of a rickety absence overloads even that most persistent scar I might call
home.
Feeble eyelid rather than a tear grumbling down a freshly gessoed canvas.
Occupy the cavilings, the vague mortal distance between perfectly human confusion and
how far north I may now need to be.
No, Not Yannis Ritsos nor Miguel Hernández
In that time, I could, finally, not cure myself of all that Ritsos inhabiting me.
Could not, that is, strip out the punch-gut delivered in fierce kicks to Miguel’s rib in a
Franco cell.
Try as I might, I was not a monarch butterfly making the skin.
Nor was I the cornflower blue of a blowfish passing a strange pebble over and again
through its tumultuous gill.
It seems I have been dancing the dance of any lost son, expert juggler of bananas and
thread, trying to hide the sucrose-broken bones of bees from needle-point pain.
It seems I’m an adept at having a string of words manifest in secret in the cunning cache
of my tongue.
The tonal texture of a theoretical compendium is apparently the undisclosed desire for
both sides of myself at once?
To be born again and again on the bed sheet as I imagine caressing a woman who cries
her name into my ache as exquisite candle wax or starlight placating my ear or Why
me—here—now?
I have been looking at myself wrongly, it seems—split between this mouth and that--
when I extract a grain of salt from my chest while examining tiny beautiful butterfly
dung in a meticulous mirror.
I could not—that is, could—continuously stray tuberculous-free from the island of Samos
to Madrid. From violent verbal house arrest to adamant adjectival onion-craving,
counting carrion down from the sky along the way.
Family Relations
Of the surviving copies of the original paintings, we know little.
The quality of body fragments is enough to facilitate our understanding—carbon dating
of the bones, drawn and imagined.
Branches of the moon drop everything small through me.
He, who somehow entered the scroll without our knowing, was collecting dust particles
with horsehair brush, beating the carpets apart.
Who was it who gave me three dead chickens, dealt a flexible fleece, the blow of botany
through the sensible sieve?
Who asked whether this mouth, this time around, might actually be enough?
If I refuse to wash the feet of beautiful Prince Genji, would Lord Narihira waggle his
waka verse back through my boyhood tongue?
Or, will it be spontaneous words—the way one speaks corolla cuts of persimmon as
lightning curves in tree bark producing the grooved-juice that makes the mouth?
I don’t care if I am permitted or verbally less fractured.
All my boyhood vowels remain drawn minutely into a Japanese landscape among the
gloriously overwhelming courage of a stand of cedars. Of a hillside of almost-
shivering pines.
That Kept Howling
for Don Coyote
Yes, we bite each other. We dear to us. We urine-mark and blame.
We search page ninety-two of every book we’ve ever bled for the phrase, They gathered
wocus and water lily seed and flung their nets.
Who is this They we read about in the scar tissue of our love?
How might I breathe alive the dead lake surrounded by junipers and sudden explosions of
blankets, one century before, marred with smallpox?
Ordinarily, touching would be enough.
Unless, of course, we front gate and excite. Unless we scent mark the pack stench of
coyote urine.
So the coyotes’ natural predators, the wolves, have been starved of and slit, caught in the
steel jaw of How to Raise Beef?
And now small hungry dogs abound to blister-bock the sheep.
Designated now as vermin?
An open season on love to trim our parka hoods with pelts?
I stood against the world of bounty hunters as if I were my own home.
There were angry ranchers who preferred me bled. Who preferred locust plagues to
coyotes. Who allowed an infestation of mice, a pelage of scruffy winter—three feet
deep—that kept howling their own-blamed name.
On the Death of Angelos Sikelianos
Now we turn to the drinker of ammonia, to the wrong bottle, to the guilt-ridden bedside
nurse.
Angelos Sikelianos refused every platitude in favor of pathetic condemnation.
I have been traveling to the Great Dismal Swamp for many years but never arrive.
I hear myself on the evening news in Greece; every report on food inscription resembles
me.
Here, check the ingredients of my mouth.
See if what I have to offer might not make you see. Might not boil water for tea, stimulate
the agony of the leaves.
If you ask for a handkerchief, I am unsure I can produce the proper embroidery.
If you request an apple each day, you can be assured of the stethoscope’s strain.
You say, Stick to the topic; tell us about our poor beloved Angelos?
You call me a heretic, say I know nothing about poetry. That I refuse you details of the
bedside table, the spoon, a dissonant drink?
Okay, let’s settle things once and for maybe.
Let’s tell the critics how Angelos and his nurse remain in that room, have together
decided never to leave.
None of the clocks in that sick room admit their sand hour to the darkness below.
They keep turning their hands through the swampy dark. Through Bachelard’s boards.
Through the sleep sessions of Robert Desnos, borrowing his mud to stand on, to
exceed what they need.
Enthused with Much Loneliness
I found myself enthused with a great loneliness.
I was crying out names of dimes, absent from my hand.
I thought I was there, but there was where?
I thought I could count to ten until I stumbled upon thirteen, then the word even, then
odd, then the oh-so-suggestive blood pheasant in the chest.
I read everything—books on body doubling (don’t ask), tattooing your cat (try only
once), how to cook asparagus using only spinach and okra, even the actress’s cologne-
drenched column in the doctor’s office, “How You Can Seduce Anyone.”
I learned that Richard Hugo’s ten-syllable line could stutter-dove. Disrupt. Self-indict.
That Rubén Darío. That Darío. That he, himself, mastered the art of dissonant relief.
Yes, to be enthused with much loneliness—great and good and inexact.
To ineffectual. To entreat. To deny that Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal
System, was born on the tenth of the month. Decry the names of dimes without
uttering Liberty-Head-Modeled-by-Wallace Stevens’s-wife-Elsie or Roosevelt-the-
Working-Class.
The actress advised avoiding games like, Oh, I’m going to be late. I’ve got another date.
Suggested, Seducing him with your upper body, your breasts, your shoulders.
Please, if in suggestively leaning over a plate of rigatoni and a bowl of radicchio, you
locate your loneliness, introduce it to no one but me.
I read everything that, within my weeping, continued to read me—the Eros of trees, the
aching green wind, the ecstasy of leaves. The blood pheasant restlessly nesting in the
chest.
I Refuse to Let You Plan My Past
I’ve read of the disrespect of others.
I’ve seen some people place a house thermometer into a deer’s leg.
There is salt in quantity too.
To whittle away part of the human heart, we employ a delicate speak as we climb the
craggy pass into a baffling word storm of confidence or disease.
Throughout many lifetimes in the streets of Kwangchow, I had lamented my sorry lot--
my two arms and feet kept juggling the memory of a triangle of Tasmanian pears.
Everything I’d wanted was far away. A tree snake, I’d learned, was something less than a
karmic perplexity.
I refused to relinquish the rickshaw moon.
I wanted a foot, delicate and milky across my back, even if it meant a day of subterfuge
and sweat.
The ultimate claptrap invention is to exist as love apart from a maligning verb tense, apart
from tree rings going round and round in the Saturn-turn of restless accusation?
Once, she’d suspected my longing—peering out from her parasol—but only for a nakedly
insistent instant.
For a long time, I have been ready to live, reflected in my own discourse reflecting me?
A star slurps back the dying exhalation of its own fiery breath?
When the mailman knocked on the door, I had a true sense of purpose, if not importance.
It was finally spring, as if the cardinal at the window bestowed upon me the burgundy
renewal of jewels, the sun-bit berry of each tree. Of every barbarous decay.
A Brief History of Mirrors
Now we come to the age of sparrows in the throat.
When I was a child I spoke rain slantwise into this tree and that.
There was a Japanese bowl from the Kamakura period.
Even then, it held the roundness of now.
Count with me here the number of owl feathers fastened to the moon.
Ask your own mouth to consider the quiet movements of a river refusing monotony.
At times we appear released, as if breaking with a great force.
We shyly and reflect and—of course—away.
There was a mirror incident in Borneo that did and did not involve me.
So it is with the water buffalo that brought parasites from the watering hole into my
lover’s arms, and her—after many years—into mine.
Dostoyevsky’s Donkey Ride
So it came to pass that every day I wore three shoes.
I wore two on my feet and a third around my neck like a medallion.
You might say I was an angry weather pattern.
You might place garlic in the mouths of the dead, even now during the pandemic.
Say the entire footprint of the fallen garage was enough to house the wind.
Say there are copycat heartbeats pounding in our chests.
Siberia, back in 1849, was one of the coldest places on earth.
Most of its fur-bearing foxes knew enough to den-up, away from comeliness and greed.
Once I rode a burro through the streets of Juárez.
My sombrero bore the mark of the moon like a heavy stone soughing goodnight.
My Cleopatra headdress said that in a former life I’d been a milk snake of a man
without the woman part of my heart.
When Geronimo surrendered and the Chiricahuas got the coughing sickness, their train
ride into exile in Florida was a death rattle caught in the throat many years in the long
way down.