George Kalamaras

Pray the Blind Syllable
 

In spite of that constellation in the shape of a rat, I try my prayer.
I require a father step into my dwindled. 

Some say sunset hope in Kansas or Indiana.
He became friends with the coroner, asking him to let his blood into a cup. 

Quietly, sixty loads of wood began to shape the blizzard.
A small sliced licking liquidly delighted my face. 

If my arm-hair looks sad, it is because of the translation.
But, in truth, a tortured weather report usually penetrates my shape. 

A complaining horizon says, hen-like, she rules, ridicules, and ruins.
More even wept, impalpable, like a noise shaped to strange. 

My anxious whisper is a form of fierce sweetness?
You touch a proverb in my sleeve? 

Cigar thread winding like smoke, aromatic, across my chest.
I drag a fibrous cemetery to every table in the neighborhood. 

I've always been lucky.  Her braids are an eclectic inheritance in my pants.
Pray the blind syllable triumphant, that it shall inherit the deep and spread of
          my girth.


 

Burial Point

The exquisite square of your lips.
The buffalo cabin of my burial point. 

The sigh of your something else.
The somehow simpler than I've ever lost. 

Yes, Pavlina, I can distinguish between your face and a hydrogen bomb.
No.  I am incapable of bronzing the sausage as if it were a dead baby shoe. 

I am secretly touching your touching of me.
I am most compliant in your hidden and your most moist. 

Thought, it is said, is given us because no sparrows were present at the
       precise moment of silk.
Can you dry my, shuffle my almost, and wake my breath—beetle-strong—
             with or without Cameroonian dung? 

The erotic purse of your lip.
The belt tightened at your waist to give you shape. 

The hush of your every and your almost.
The buffalo robe of my burial point.


 

Summary Decay
 

For the yes of snow and the stray troops of music burn.
For my organic, anachronistic labor is more than a contracted road crew. 

I was busy cutting off a finger - no it must have been the giraffe's lush
          savannah tongue.
I'd never been that tall - no it must have been the fringe of a rodent's chewed
          tail. 

My spelling contest self left me with solitary interruptions of my own word.
I stood confined in the mirror and repeated Albuquerque, letter by letter,
       without following the first u with an r, the final e with a reliquary of bone. 

Gene Frumkin wrote me tonight, the eve of his 76^th birthday, about Don
      Gordon's posthumous collection.
I experienced a half-world of 1950's summary decay. 

I asked the chiropractor to see if I was indeed composed of inexplicable birds.
You are gentle mud, he confided, all male and vaguely skin. 

Then my back became a valuable physics of water.
My thumbprint, the point of entering the Northwest Territories somehow from
          Romania. 

If you finger my collective grammar, you'll locate a political twin.
2 x 4 x 8 and we're there, in the I Ching's 64^th hexagram, doubling the
        sulfurous lunar eclipse, beginning - of course - again.