George Kalamaras
BORN INTO THE BODY OF A HOUND
I should have been born in Cataract Falls
in the body of a beagle. I remember
traveling one lifetime through the excretory canal
of an earthworm, landing squarely
on a hook. The piercing
lightning in my body cave tells me
spiritual growth is possible. If there’s a blister
on my impossible ankle, it’s because
I have been walking the paw paths of wolves
for as long as the world
has held fire in the whimpering it has forged.
Smoke gets into the eye of the goat
nibbling the berries of the yew tree
on the hill’s hill. It’s not doubletalk
to house two beagles lovingly in the slipped mist
of the thorax where the body holds the burning
birds of Mexican aviaries Cortez destroyed.
If tea comes to a boil then the leaves
might forecast a phoenix diving
into the Solomon Sea, eating the mucous shield
of a cloud fish just east of Papua
New Guinea. Funny, how water and fire
rarely mix except in that dream where you set
the broken leg of a lynx with a splint
made of coyote bone. Why did Randy California
die in Hawai’i and not in Peru,
Indiana? I swear I first heard his guitar
howl a dark stretch between two towns
bordering the Wabash. See, now, how
my teenage self stunk like monkfish
while two decades later Randy sunk off the coast
of Molokai. One of my friends said after a reading
last week that he didn’t get my poems
till he allowed himself to let go
of the story and followed the heartbeat
of hounds in my bawl-mouth
lines. Such a wind the cripples stepped off of
on the long bridge between here and hare, between
rabbit shit and snow. Which tells me even Neil Young
called Cortez a killer, and his guitar
was nowhere near as sensitive as the aching rain
I was given to coat the long days
of the throat. The first time my beagle got the scent
of the hunt she was a pup, barely twelve
weeks. I actually cried in awe watching her
whimper and howl and tremble the trail
of all that had been hidden. Like a poem
with many voice, not voices. With one throat
that is past, present, and never
perturbed. I should have come
into the body this time as a beagle-hound
in Cataract Falls, licking the blister
of the birth canal and the long passage through.
If there’s a coyote in my bones it is because
of the canine rain aching my throat, the way joy enters
one at unexpected moments of sorrow.
Melancholia is mendacious. Mencius
repeated many things Chuang Tzu said
after Lao Tzu said them first. The world burns
as the breath turns one person
to the next. One sorrow
to downward phoenix flight that lifts. The many-
voiced bawling of hounds lends the bled of their own
true selves as they follow their own trail
and zigzag scent a way. If you try to follow the story,
you’ll get lost in the mazy woods of the words.
We don’t die and come back as a king.
We don’t donate money to church and walk out
of stained glass a minute later into the burning
birth-light of a lottery ticket that wins.
You’ve got to let go of thinking
details move in a straight line, that sorrow
is sad. Okay, enough bled. I am going to sleep now.
It is late even though it is morning.
FOR THE SOULS OF AMERICAN HOUNDS THAT,
AFTER LEAVING THE BODY, WANDER THE DEPTHS OF THE GOBI
These hounds, now, live in a house of unformed bricks.
There will probably not be, at least in Kentucky, a meteorological advancement to compare with a pan of sea-lice, lightly roasted, over coals of rolled scorpion shells.
The great migration of a dog’s soul is honored with a tin cup, a glost of horse urine, drank, into the human body, three times before the burning burden of noon.
The Gobi Desert is also known as 瀚海 Hànhǎi, endless sea.
The Song of the Volga Boatmen resounded in the cavity of what had been a silky hound ear.
Yes, turn left onto the Camels’ Road of Affliction.
Go to the Monastery of Shande-Miao.
Since we have neither time nor inclination to expose ourselves to the risk of a broken arm or leg, we have given Larson instructions to select for us a camel that is calm and cool-headed.
Don’t utter even a single sound of it, he replied slowly, then pounded into his tent stakes the utterance of his arm muscle, the vibration of the Word is Law.
With 114 illustrations and three and a half maps.
Our caravans assemble in Mongolia.
In search of all the hound-sound we have lost.
A thief-hunt in the desert.
A pastoral camp.
A Chinese festival and a German courier.
Listen, Gary once told me, I feel more comfortable walking in a field of Indiana hounds.
I went to bars after prison, and sat there and watched how to talk and act.
And, yes, I used to drink my sister’s rinse-water, wrung from her hair.
Go to the Gobi, I told the soul of the dog who visited my dream.
The human body can be so confining.
Animal breath—the rise and slough of the ribs—equally so.
The hounds live in a house now of unburned bricks.
For us, for me, that we should one day be compelled to leave the body and go.
And go in search of.
All at once we were interrupted in the middle of our work. Unaccustomed whining sounds were heard in the entrance to our tent. And Chang entered, holding in his hand a tiny new-born pup, no larger than a rat.
Were all our hardships and sacrifices really to be in vain?
He went to bars after leaving the bars of prison.
Let me be clear--
Winter hardens
I packed away with all haste three ounces of camel water and slows of sunlight
in a shallow, not-very-meandering river
I would drink her rinse-water and her urine, her field-sweat in barley stooks
through which passed the soul of every wandering hound
There will likely not be, at least in Indiana, a litter whelped onto the goose down of a hunting jacket splotched with the blood of a field pheasant.
The Song of the Volga Boatmen outside the Monastery of Shande-Miao.
Three maps or four through unburned bricks thirteen hands high.
All along the Silk Road. Into burning rocks and blistering noon. Into the austerities of camels perforating moon-water. Resounding in the cavity. The great migration of hound silk drank through the pores of human skin.
TONGUES : 16
Then they were inside me
where they kissed me
where they licked me
until I came and shamed
their unusual mouths.
Calfskin I wore
like a sixth sense
like the clitoral hood,
a milky body
brought out of starlight,
as I stood my spindly breath
bolding for more.
They uttered Mother,
mouthed me toward dissolve,
tongued me
dry, allowed my first vow of truly desert
sun. Ancient and anguished. The sweat
of the long road and great prairie flower dispersed
as cruel particles of fire on my groin
blown back to seed. Heard a stir
in twos and threes, the great stirrup
of the ear, cilia-safe, like the momentous arm hair
of a father, divorced from a six-year-old’s
touch, the boy with the erection
in that photograph from Kerala,
holding his fisherman-father’s leg.
Then they told me my name,
which was more like shame
like Greek with a limp of English, exact
in its stance, or starlight sinning
in the deaf man’s ear.
I heard moan light meticulate
the tongue of all mouths,
saw their snake-like ecstasies
not as narration but as sound
advice. How my limp of tongue
how my tough how my terrible
would one day heal
was and was not
apparent. How the moaning doves
in the fictive tree storied
my voice back to blue-black
starling-song. Then they rested,
one by one, these hidden stringent
tongues. And lay themselves awry,
dark boards for a walk.
The moon bore wet upon their saliva
pools inside, salved and sodden and sad,
my I my we. Inside each, I came
into the mirror of my loss, losing
their beestings, their bent, their magnificent,
their bee-breathing bedouin clutch.
____________________
cilia-safe
TONGUES : 34
In whom have I lost
a voice? Divorce before age three
seems such a small thing. Starlight-
tanned, bruise view, eggplant
grounding the counter with
a concept of curried soup? Ask
the hawk absorbing, circle
by circle, an entire sound
of ground.
I absolve,
beautiful weaver I ab(solve) all in you
that has made me
almost whole fractured tongue
slat not quite three not ever
quite three that has clued
my feather and my medulla
with looking up and up
and out over stalks tall as a blood
community punctuating the entire summer.
I revolve and resolve all sound.
I cannot and I will not
and I hope for more.
In whom has the woman
lost a chalking,
a color-him-
through, a weaving, a
Something concrete?
You want a story? A narrative thread?
A cliff-effaced monk cave
carrying the secret scent of self something
song or eroded or ground? Okay,
say childhurt say childhurt hurt so bad that this tongue of it
and must and speak.
But for your lice
but for your sea
but for your extraordinary sea-lice, effervescent,
to which I bow and pick and
eat. But for your conduit feather, purest egg,
basting over and again
a community of wounded Brahms
particles in my in your just below our.
(Say childhurt hurt
Say it had been much easier to dissolve
Say growing up without the proper text of tongue
could or couldn’t but can’t
)
And so my mouth
And so my mouth
and your tongue
are tough as many waters wrangling
their sea-cow sound upon the shore.
Give me your stalk, your pale green
splay. Figure the dimensions
of my cruelest salt sheet-stain pause
between wanting you so bad and wanting
not to want. Construct me
in your moist in the sheer green gauze of your hose. Let me
lull in your star-sting part.
Heart me, heart you,
heat of the subtle spine
I refuse to speak
but in the language-send of seed.
She, a color lust, black turtle-
neck elongating her prose-
denim skirt her hips, a full,
a wanting on the least of his
On the counter, also,
a snail shell, a yam the kale-green green of kale, the sound
of a sweet articulate grooming
of two ponies asking an entire field
of color, in the only
teeth and tuck of their tongue,
Who is he?
Who is she?
Who are they now?
____________________
many waters wrangling their sea-cow sound upon the shore
EVER BROKEN
Delicate letters in the hide of an ass.
Delicate math your mouth modulates into mine.
Divert me to the static of your understanding.
Let me form a parrot from these gloves and dust, mimic cage-strange mouth movements
of almost-music.
Repeat after me, Nothing is worth repeating.
I’m not talking river risk but the border of a bygone shoulder-slope of hope.
You say, Stand at the wall and let the leeches profit from what you should have said.
You say, Gentlemen, aim low, please, and forgive his groinal moan.
Blindfold me; do forego the smoke, and—yes—keep reading me the urine inscriptions of
Vallejo, even as I stink.
I have been a cartridge echo a long time, afraid of coffee shops, false teeth, the one true
word I should have said just once, on one occasion, in the opening suture of the first
page of the first book ever broken.