George Kalamaras
Body Rites
Because myth is the timbre of measure, let me utter the function of impediment.
I indicated an esoteric strain in my geographic representation, but you chose the demotic
ravagings of my tongue.
There was a small labor camp we had all worked in.
It was called A Theory of Discourse.
The major problem is the euphoric cluster of grapes in sunlight by the window in the corner.
I am completed only in my unabridgement.
An apparent paradox might convey textures of the tongue.
My mother was my father. And my father, my brother.
Lineaments of parallel bones plague me frown to frown.
When I moved next door, the nominative inscription of my past was performed on my forehead,
in the body rites of the swollen, suggestive dead.
Refusing the Bruise
Can anyone speak the kava root before a leisurely fire of twigs and burning snow?
I was born that time as a single charred ember.
I had been a short life.
I had been an intimate breath scalding the sherpa’s lung as he stroked a cigarette toward
the pink bled of yet another Himalayan dawn.
Little dark scar I might kick away sharp.
There are no “ly” adverbs when all adjectives refuse the bruise of naming only by color-thrust.
Fifty million years passed before the influx of modern fish through the impossible ocean of the heart.
Whether we believe it or not, whether we monk-cell or hen-eel or bit, we certainly do believe.
My speech in many ways had become hesitant. Pockmarked with relative success.
Anything passive might be construed as voicings of oceanic strain.
Little downpour of my heart. Can anyone speak a short life? A barely this, a somehow that?
A brief bout? An evolutionary fast?
Let me taste the broken pact, the spoken act of a god.
Those Lives as a Hesychast
Forgive me if I return to those lives as a Hesychast.
So much of me now has been shaped by all I could never achieve.
Variety, they say, is the hallmark of Tanzania’s Game Reserves.
I cannot tell whether I prefer the Double-breasted or Hairy-breasted Barbet.
In 1923, André and Clara Malraux journeyed to French Indo-chine in search of a forgotten Khmer temple.
I tell you this—it is not wise to lift a few relics and try to make a killing on the American market.
Nor is it spiritually sound. This is the story of a formidable brilliance.
The story of a first rumbling of war resembling an independent incitement in the chest.
So what does this have to do with those lives I spent as a Hesychast monk?
Did I fake Byzantium, the bejeweled cross on the cloth of a Mount Athos altar, in order to get Brahms to relinquish
fire ants he’d implanted—with minor chords—into my left wrist?
Let’s put it this way: a Megaloschemos monk wearing the Great Habit is more than a daily practice, more
than a river resembling a meandering slack.
The Gombe Stream Game Reserve on the northeastern shore of Lake Tanganyika was established in 1945 primarily to
protect the chimpanzee population, dwindling—it was reported—among the shuttle-scruff of laying their
fists while walking too long into the waste of their brethren.
Term
That, of course, is not us—only a bone suture, purchased monthly from our pay.
An insidious nostalgia plagues me life to life.
For what restoration might I hobble my limp?
Consider why history undergoes invention, why the molecules of broken Ethiopian clay pots are salvaged
and reused as carriage house bricks in Connecticut and Tennessee.
Nor does the merciless winter cooperate.
Last night four inches of snow buried a bed of ice like a conspiring thug.
I might unlook a brief appeal as I descend the stair and open the door.
Who might be waiting to touch me with guilt? How did they track my mouth through all these incarnations,
all the long way here?
A throng of coffin floods may or may not be recognizable.
At any rate, yes, hyphenated sleep joined all sorts of things together and became more than an annual term
payment. More than a groggy word-phrase.
Nine months labor on a rock bed of hard ice?
No magic tact of a blowtorch sun to finally make things right?
Let’s settle it once and for maybe. I was born because I needed to be born.
There are so many karmic seeds to expunge, this time, in the cool fires of the brain, waiting for the egg release
of eels electric with ecstasy upon the moment-moist altar of the spine.
There Will Always Be Generous Weather Inside the Body’s Mood
A damp rag of starlight does not comfort China’s furthest moon.
It does not sink Upper Volta below Lower Volta—or beneath any urgent digging.
I used to think it was not that difficult to burrow through dirt to the earth’s core.
Then I was born.
I lit a torch with kerosene rag in search of my own cleanly bathed egg.
The immune system of an anemone stings even the most lavish glance.
There will always be generous weather inside the body’s mood.
The wind stops, and the mouth cannot enact but makes moments in the moist.
If you died of dehydration, were found hankeyless in the sand—without even a red bandana—might they call you,
Salt, He Ate Some Salt?
Would they slit themselves silly, beg the moon’s beached fish back the strange way they came?
Endless symmetrical hour of growing up.
Of trimming one’s own ivy back so that they won’t make you bleed.
All this brings me to the shallow sound, the shark in my ribcage thrashing and trapped.
All this speaks, Yes, I have a damp breath that continuously moves through a cataract of already-breathed air.
Prefect Pai Talks and Laughs and Rights a Strange Injustice
Yellowing paper on the desk and six feet of gauze.
With the help of friends, we might find the inimical demands of death.
I had an enemy. She had a friend.
The weaving shop owner passed a thread right through the heat of the cold.
That had been in my chest. Words attempted to climb us right, as if afflicted with other
words.
It was like trying to build a piece of sky, one ladder foot at a time.
He sat on a tiger skin mat, closed his breath, and explored the heavens.
He tapped me here in the chest—just a glance—and I too was gone for one, long, infinite breath.
Someone needed grounding. Anyone.
Someone was crying out with the affliction of a language-bitten life.
Lead the donkey down the stone path of what, in us, is mostly echo.
Walk across the way my first and only word remains my last.
Reincarnation from the Killing Field
That was when I grabbed the pan of fried rice and tried to find the iron scalding my shirt.
It was the time of blood in the clocks, a century of sand in the wrist.
I would sometimes turn a hummingbird upside down to count each grain of blood.
I would pace the house as if expecting a fourth child from my fifth unborn daughter.
So different language tongues were comfortable and completely at home in my speech.
I might memorize every sentence in my memoir, In Loving Me, They Feed Me Crocodile Dung: Then They
Might Kill Me.
Little strawberry light about to auburn-braid my hair. Come eel-like into my stance.
Activate centuries of spiritual longing. Longing for release.
So I became attentive to Kundalini. To Kali.
So, I should say, my gorgeous past gorgeously attracted exactly my need.
There was a pile of skulls in the killing field and a national spokesperson who could be reached only by
unbuttoning the left cuff of every right-handed shirt.
When she answered, she swore she never knew me, or at least had not known I’d been in the vicinity all
those years speaking Macedonian, Khmer, or Japanese.
Why I Never Cross My Legs at a Funeral
The circumference of salt is a ragged outline of deranged clock hands.
We sank swiftly into the superstition of Greek grandparents and, thus, never laid a hat on a bed, opened
an umbrella in the house, or gave someone a knife without selling it to him or her for a penny.
It resembles the folly of lingering smoke, as if it were a corner hoodlum.
Jingoism may or may not be intentional. Even crushed bees in the spine of a dead possum do not care.
If the crew devoted itself to washing the movie, more than film canisters would get wet.
What about those parts of ourselves we’ve left in the snow-vasts of Zhivago’s Saint Petersburg? In Bogie’s and
Bergman’s everlasting sand in Morocco?
European fears ranged from salt over the shoulder to breaking a mirror to dropping a fork or a knife.
Still, I never cross my legs in a church or at a funeral.
A further disturbance to rouse my Greek-blood sleep was not required.
We ate the salt, inherited the bloat, and the men among us got moody on a monthly basis, at the passing of
a black cat, at the opening of an umbrella in the house, or as we walked down a street with a ladder
from the Old Country blocking our way.
Dance Lesson
I couldn’t redeem my flower but took the ash of Adam’s eyelash as a source of unrest.
No one quite knew why I sang in avalanche. In a voice of many snows.
The immensity of an ice field as an exact explanation of my past thoroughly excuses the casualties as consent.
To give both spare sofa cushions away, as my wife suggests, may seem sensible, but is it a redeemable situation?
I thought about blood. I considered an engorged human ear.
I imagined myself as Van Gogh donating my buttons to the poor.
They say a list of typhus vaccines may prove inconclusive, that we are shot through with our past in ways only
the malarial mouths of mosquitoes may know.
Everyone thinks of the poor, especially when they bow to the evening cauliflower on the cutting board and admit
a certain loneliness, confiding, Please, don’t let me be eaten first.
I overcame the sadness of your hair, though mostly during the unknown holidays absorbed through the
furnace grate.
I wore a coat I couldn’t close, sat on an old worn couch, and watched distant films of how I’d earlier thought
things would be, counting the elegant steps of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron.
Unfinished Sutra with a Dozen Different Titles
The Trouble with Being Human.
Yes, I Really Do Eat Twigs.
A History of Because.
The Catastrophics.
If in Eating an Aspirin I Were to Sway.
Why Are the Words “Real Fun” Embedded in the Word “Funeral”?
A History—of Course—of History.
Turn Off the Spectrometer (To the Tune of “Give Me Your Groin”).
Winter Kill Awaiting the Killing Frost, Awaiting the Negligee.
The Light Goes on Lying.
The Secret Life of Indiana Voles (As Performed in Rain).
Here, Hold the Buffalo Robe While I Pee.
Because myth is the timbre of measure, let me utter the function of impediment.
I indicated an esoteric strain in my geographic representation, but you chose the demotic
ravagings of my tongue.
There was a small labor camp we had all worked in.
It was called A Theory of Discourse.
The major problem is the euphoric cluster of grapes in sunlight by the window in the corner.
I am completed only in my unabridgement.
An apparent paradox might convey textures of the tongue.
My mother was my father. And my father, my brother.
Lineaments of parallel bones plague me frown to frown.
When I moved next door, the nominative inscription of my past was performed on my forehead,
in the body rites of the swollen, suggestive dead.
Refusing the Bruise
Can anyone speak the kava root before a leisurely fire of twigs and burning snow?
I was born that time as a single charred ember.
I had been a short life.
I had been an intimate breath scalding the sherpa’s lung as he stroked a cigarette toward
the pink bled of yet another Himalayan dawn.
Little dark scar I might kick away sharp.
There are no “ly” adverbs when all adjectives refuse the bruise of naming only by color-thrust.
Fifty million years passed before the influx of modern fish through the impossible ocean of the heart.
Whether we believe it or not, whether we monk-cell or hen-eel or bit, we certainly do believe.
My speech in many ways had become hesitant. Pockmarked with relative success.
Anything passive might be construed as voicings of oceanic strain.
Little downpour of my heart. Can anyone speak a short life? A barely this, a somehow that?
A brief bout? An evolutionary fast?
Let me taste the broken pact, the spoken act of a god.
Those Lives as a Hesychast
Forgive me if I return to those lives as a Hesychast.
So much of me now has been shaped by all I could never achieve.
Variety, they say, is the hallmark of Tanzania’s Game Reserves.
I cannot tell whether I prefer the Double-breasted or Hairy-breasted Barbet.
In 1923, André and Clara Malraux journeyed to French Indo-chine in search of a forgotten Khmer temple.
I tell you this—it is not wise to lift a few relics and try to make a killing on the American market.
Nor is it spiritually sound. This is the story of a formidable brilliance.
The story of a first rumbling of war resembling an independent incitement in the chest.
So what does this have to do with those lives I spent as a Hesychast monk?
Did I fake Byzantium, the bejeweled cross on the cloth of a Mount Athos altar, in order to get Brahms to relinquish
fire ants he’d implanted—with minor chords—into my left wrist?
Let’s put it this way: a Megaloschemos monk wearing the Great Habit is more than a daily practice, more
than a river resembling a meandering slack.
The Gombe Stream Game Reserve on the northeastern shore of Lake Tanganyika was established in 1945 primarily to
protect the chimpanzee population, dwindling—it was reported—among the shuttle-scruff of laying their
fists while walking too long into the waste of their brethren.
Term
That, of course, is not us—only a bone suture, purchased monthly from our pay.
An insidious nostalgia plagues me life to life.
For what restoration might I hobble my limp?
Consider why history undergoes invention, why the molecules of broken Ethiopian clay pots are salvaged
and reused as carriage house bricks in Connecticut and Tennessee.
Nor does the merciless winter cooperate.
Last night four inches of snow buried a bed of ice like a conspiring thug.
I might unlook a brief appeal as I descend the stair and open the door.
Who might be waiting to touch me with guilt? How did they track my mouth through all these incarnations,
all the long way here?
A throng of coffin floods may or may not be recognizable.
At any rate, yes, hyphenated sleep joined all sorts of things together and became more than an annual term
payment. More than a groggy word-phrase.
Nine months labor on a rock bed of hard ice?
No magic tact of a blowtorch sun to finally make things right?
Let’s settle it once and for maybe. I was born because I needed to be born.
There are so many karmic seeds to expunge, this time, in the cool fires of the brain, waiting for the egg release
of eels electric with ecstasy upon the moment-moist altar of the spine.
There Will Always Be Generous Weather Inside the Body’s Mood
A damp rag of starlight does not comfort China’s furthest moon.
It does not sink Upper Volta below Lower Volta—or beneath any urgent digging.
I used to think it was not that difficult to burrow through dirt to the earth’s core.
Then I was born.
I lit a torch with kerosene rag in search of my own cleanly bathed egg.
The immune system of an anemone stings even the most lavish glance.
There will always be generous weather inside the body’s mood.
The wind stops, and the mouth cannot enact but makes moments in the moist.
If you died of dehydration, were found hankeyless in the sand—without even a red bandana—might they call you,
Salt, He Ate Some Salt?
Would they slit themselves silly, beg the moon’s beached fish back the strange way they came?
Endless symmetrical hour of growing up.
Of trimming one’s own ivy back so that they won’t make you bleed.
All this brings me to the shallow sound, the shark in my ribcage thrashing and trapped.
All this speaks, Yes, I have a damp breath that continuously moves through a cataract of already-breathed air.
Prefect Pai Talks and Laughs and Rights a Strange Injustice
Yellowing paper on the desk and six feet of gauze.
With the help of friends, we might find the inimical demands of death.
I had an enemy. She had a friend.
The weaving shop owner passed a thread right through the heat of the cold.
That had been in my chest. Words attempted to climb us right, as if afflicted with other
words.
It was like trying to build a piece of sky, one ladder foot at a time.
He sat on a tiger skin mat, closed his breath, and explored the heavens.
He tapped me here in the chest—just a glance—and I too was gone for one, long, infinite breath.
Someone needed grounding. Anyone.
Someone was crying out with the affliction of a language-bitten life.
Lead the donkey down the stone path of what, in us, is mostly echo.
Walk across the way my first and only word remains my last.
Reincarnation from the Killing Field
That was when I grabbed the pan of fried rice and tried to find the iron scalding my shirt.
It was the time of blood in the clocks, a century of sand in the wrist.
I would sometimes turn a hummingbird upside down to count each grain of blood.
I would pace the house as if expecting a fourth child from my fifth unborn daughter.
So different language tongues were comfortable and completely at home in my speech.
I might memorize every sentence in my memoir, In Loving Me, They Feed Me Crocodile Dung: Then They
Might Kill Me.
Little strawberry light about to auburn-braid my hair. Come eel-like into my stance.
Activate centuries of spiritual longing. Longing for release.
So I became attentive to Kundalini. To Kali.
So, I should say, my gorgeous past gorgeously attracted exactly my need.
There was a pile of skulls in the killing field and a national spokesperson who could be reached only by
unbuttoning the left cuff of every right-handed shirt.
When she answered, she swore she never knew me, or at least had not known I’d been in the vicinity all
those years speaking Macedonian, Khmer, or Japanese.
Why I Never Cross My Legs at a Funeral
The circumference of salt is a ragged outline of deranged clock hands.
We sank swiftly into the superstition of Greek grandparents and, thus, never laid a hat on a bed, opened
an umbrella in the house, or gave someone a knife without selling it to him or her for a penny.
It resembles the folly of lingering smoke, as if it were a corner hoodlum.
Jingoism may or may not be intentional. Even crushed bees in the spine of a dead possum do not care.
If the crew devoted itself to washing the movie, more than film canisters would get wet.
What about those parts of ourselves we’ve left in the snow-vasts of Zhivago’s Saint Petersburg? In Bogie’s and
Bergman’s everlasting sand in Morocco?
European fears ranged from salt over the shoulder to breaking a mirror to dropping a fork or a knife.
Still, I never cross my legs in a church or at a funeral.
A further disturbance to rouse my Greek-blood sleep was not required.
We ate the salt, inherited the bloat, and the men among us got moody on a monthly basis, at the passing of
a black cat, at the opening of an umbrella in the house, or as we walked down a street with a ladder
from the Old Country blocking our way.
Dance Lesson
I couldn’t redeem my flower but took the ash of Adam’s eyelash as a source of unrest.
No one quite knew why I sang in avalanche. In a voice of many snows.
The immensity of an ice field as an exact explanation of my past thoroughly excuses the casualties as consent.
To give both spare sofa cushions away, as my wife suggests, may seem sensible, but is it a redeemable situation?
I thought about blood. I considered an engorged human ear.
I imagined myself as Van Gogh donating my buttons to the poor.
They say a list of typhus vaccines may prove inconclusive, that we are shot through with our past in ways only
the malarial mouths of mosquitoes may know.
Everyone thinks of the poor, especially when they bow to the evening cauliflower on the cutting board and admit
a certain loneliness, confiding, Please, don’t let me be eaten first.
I overcame the sadness of your hair, though mostly during the unknown holidays absorbed through the
furnace grate.
I wore a coat I couldn’t close, sat on an old worn couch, and watched distant films of how I’d earlier thought
things would be, counting the elegant steps of Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron.
Unfinished Sutra with a Dozen Different Titles
The Trouble with Being Human.
Yes, I Really Do Eat Twigs.
A History of Because.
The Catastrophics.
If in Eating an Aspirin I Were to Sway.
Why Are the Words “Real Fun” Embedded in the Word “Funeral”?
A History—of Course—of History.
Turn Off the Spectrometer (To the Tune of “Give Me Your Groin”).
Winter Kill Awaiting the Killing Frost, Awaiting the Negligee.
The Light Goes on Lying.
The Secret Life of Indiana Voles (As Performed in Rain).
Here, Hold the Buffalo Robe While I Pee.
