George Kalamaras
____________________________________
Each of my
seven
choices of you
____________________________________
TONGUES : 28
A mild description of summer
that doesn’t occlude me. Leave him alone,
she said, he’s my friend. I see the outline,
the fullness of her thigh as something to wrap me
in folds of the animal, of strict
elephant love. Maybe she’ll grunt
when she stands in the salad line, begging
for spoons, make me sway myself all the way
to the croutons, to the sunflower
seed. It’s always such a long way from here
to there. I’ve always adored
the bare shoulder of a woman. That’s one reason
I’m still nine inside—brassiere strap clasp
of a neighbor, untucked, still cloying to me
from a 1960s shell restyled
for 2012. I’ve always
smuggled my love. With loving myself. The African
hedgehog. Pink chloritic green. Even my feed.
Let me uncross my leg
and love you. Dissolve me
a summer I can’t describe in my most
ubiquitous grooming. A summer
of ’42 for a nine-year-old
in 1965? A forty-seven years later
making me bleed?
She bleeds,
mostly, like a ritual elephant
month about to small itself
to song. Okay. I’ve uncrossed my leg,
creased the other. I’ve soaked the sheets,
over and again, regrooved
the stains, and now my nerve
________________________
We must be nearly the same age. I recognize your vaccination
endings pause a different pitch.
Have you ever loved an elephant tusk
thrust up through the trunk of a plane tree
balancing, fully orange, a moonless sky?
She is so slim in her weight taut
in her fullness.
Will she shape my hair? Trim my mustache?
Teach me scraps of lettuce and arugula?
Crawl her song of coarse mammalian breath
vast across my chest? They gave my wife
bitch’s milk as a homeopathic cure,
and now I’m the one aroused and full of shame?
Speak my name, include my scar, summer
my mouth-phloxed flex. I can never retrace
my pants, even as you breathe. Stroll a sad
gray thigh of the animal, of strict elephant love
bramble-swishing past.
Who are you?
Who am I, really? Locate the speaker
in the sand-gravel peck of each of our
dusk-filled voice. Pluralize the verse.
Dissolve the salt of dichotomy
through each chakra, in each
of my seven choices of you.
Ground the plant in a grumbling tumbleweed.
Boil the butter. Broil my salt. Clarify my hair.
Just a few more inches of this inhaling
heat burrs my hat from inside in.
I’ve always adored. Always adored the torn,
the partially bare, scrap
of a word I’ve wrong-songed to luck.
Worshiped, in fact, the untucked as the only
understandable, if not definable.
We must our mouth.
We must have approximate mouths.
We must for four, maybe five, days a month.
The way the thin, the lovely of your strap,
straps me hard. I must resolve dissolve
this weeping and seek your secret
bleed. The scar of our arms.
We must be nearly the same age.
I recognize your vaccination.
LETTER TO MICHELLE FROM VICTOR
Scrabblings of dusk. Conjugated grief. Some dead, dying, died. Workers working still the mines. Michelle, we might secondsay the heat, admit July, Colorado-dry, into our bones. Profess to know the many sways. Feldspar and gold. We might bow before the ciborium of sunset cutting back across this lack or that, high here in Victor. 9,695 feet. The Colorado Labor Wars. Union strikes still struck. Like a lantern about to tip. Deaths still dead. Sea-gone groan. The strange mouthings of primitive fish high in rock and tight. The way religion promulgates the past. There was a little girl in a long denim skirt went door to door for Christ. Her father, a pastor. Her mother saw the end of the world, all the way from Bedford, Indiana to Oskaloosa. Iowa is more than farming animals and calm. Sometimes our past unscrews our shoes. You step this way, that. Have taken strides away from Bible-Belt life. One buckle. Two. How were you and I born into the same breath? Why this incarnation here, now?
Mary Ann says Victor is more than ghosts. The Ashanti Mining Company stoking Rocky Mountain gold all the way back to Johannesburg, lugging it out of the bones of the many-soaked. Miners coughing dust as if two packs of Luckies a day. Backwards, the lines try to survive. Slavs in Pueblo. Ludlow Greeks. The German dead of Victor. Dead, dying, decried. Masked. As if. As if morality was not a play. Right and wrong never performed. As if Euripides was not an Athenian. He saw the veins of men as a net the gods made to catch us in like wild beasts, the poet wrote. And was right. Here, now. Just five miles southeast of Cripple Creek, this town can’t walk. Five miles from where it gave the gold and built a name. Gave all its blood and hurt. This place of graves. M.M. Demeree. Ella Porter. Minnie Denson. Two dogs named Shep. Donkey dust of mules gone quick over the sluicey ledge. The horse part of the mule all panic-ear and twitch. We have been made by truly two, multiples of moaning dust. We have been children far too long. You still walk door to door inside your most private. Test this latch and that. Lug the donkey dust of your father’s church into how and why you cry. I, too, flinch at the voice of strain. Parents who no longer loved, even themselves. Who in feeling unloved just tried to survive. Strange mouthings of almost-human pain. Dry and tight in the shy animal spine. This raccoon or that. Fox blood in our sleep. Possum our mouths out with toads. Mary Ann calls it quaint. The old Victor Hotel. This ghost-town most. A town of 445. Only a brothel-turned-breakfast joint. One rail of men who exhaust the mine, hunched at the bar called The Young Buck. And all those boarded doors. News-papered glass. Ranch-hand sad. 10,000 feet, you’d think, would be closer to the Lord of Hosts. Like a lantern that in losing its grip tips heaven light to hay.
We are all burning up inside for mine-dusting the light. Your father was a church. Does well, you say, with grief. My mother and father and I divorced at age three. One-one thousand, two. Children’s games are voice. Count the seconds about to be our lives. Why this life for us this life now? You and I destined to meet? Victor doesn’t stand for Victory but for the man who tossed his name into a hat. We should all be so lucky to be christened by chance. Backwards, we turn to our past for shoes. Step inside. This foot, that. Walk with our maculate hands. Drag our monkey-knuckled self to the mineral shelf. The Western Federation of Miners is dead as a thrown-bolt latch. Strike, struck, strucked. Conjugate the match. Friction the boot. Drag the sulfur up through the sole of the foot into our most fretful stance. Secondsay the heat. We are here, Michelle—ingots of ignoble birth, brilliants of light then dead. The strange mouthings of fish. Mimes caught in the pant. Fossilized and fixed. The sea-gone groan. Found in this town. Found only in rock in the search for gold. Dynamite-blast and pick-axe stance. The strange strained wraithings of now.
Each of my
seven
choices of you
____________________________________
TONGUES : 28
A mild description of summer
that doesn’t occlude me. Leave him alone,
she said, he’s my friend. I see the outline,
the fullness of her thigh as something to wrap me
in folds of the animal, of strict
elephant love. Maybe she’ll grunt
when she stands in the salad line, begging
for spoons, make me sway myself all the way
to the croutons, to the sunflower
seed. It’s always such a long way from here
to there. I’ve always adored
the bare shoulder of a woman. That’s one reason
I’m still nine inside—brassiere strap clasp
of a neighbor, untucked, still cloying to me
from a 1960s shell restyled
for 2012. I’ve always
smuggled my love. With loving myself. The African
hedgehog. Pink chloritic green. Even my feed.
Let me uncross my leg
and love you. Dissolve me
a summer I can’t describe in my most
ubiquitous grooming. A summer
of ’42 for a nine-year-old
in 1965? A forty-seven years later
making me bleed?
She bleeds,
mostly, like a ritual elephant
month about to small itself
to song. Okay. I’ve uncrossed my leg,
creased the other. I’ve soaked the sheets,
over and again, regrooved
the stains, and now my nerve
________________________
We must be nearly the same age. I recognize your vaccination
endings pause a different pitch.
Have you ever loved an elephant tusk
thrust up through the trunk of a plane tree
balancing, fully orange, a moonless sky?
She is so slim in her weight taut
in her fullness.
Will she shape my hair? Trim my mustache?
Teach me scraps of lettuce and arugula?
Crawl her song of coarse mammalian breath
vast across my chest? They gave my wife
bitch’s milk as a homeopathic cure,
and now I’m the one aroused and full of shame?
Speak my name, include my scar, summer
my mouth-phloxed flex. I can never retrace
my pants, even as you breathe. Stroll a sad
gray thigh of the animal, of strict elephant love
bramble-swishing past.
Who are you?
Who am I, really? Locate the speaker
in the sand-gravel peck of each of our
dusk-filled voice. Pluralize the verse.
Dissolve the salt of dichotomy
through each chakra, in each
of my seven choices of you.
Ground the plant in a grumbling tumbleweed.
Boil the butter. Broil my salt. Clarify my hair.
Just a few more inches of this inhaling
heat burrs my hat from inside in.
I’ve always adored. Always adored the torn,
the partially bare, scrap
of a word I’ve wrong-songed to luck.
Worshiped, in fact, the untucked as the only
understandable, if not definable.
We must our mouth.
We must have approximate mouths.
We must for four, maybe five, days a month.
The way the thin, the lovely of your strap,
straps me hard. I must resolve dissolve
this weeping and seek your secret
bleed. The scar of our arms.
We must be nearly the same age.
I recognize your vaccination.
LETTER TO MICHELLE FROM VICTOR
Scrabblings of dusk. Conjugated grief. Some dead, dying, died. Workers working still the mines. Michelle, we might secondsay the heat, admit July, Colorado-dry, into our bones. Profess to know the many sways. Feldspar and gold. We might bow before the ciborium of sunset cutting back across this lack or that, high here in Victor. 9,695 feet. The Colorado Labor Wars. Union strikes still struck. Like a lantern about to tip. Deaths still dead. Sea-gone groan. The strange mouthings of primitive fish high in rock and tight. The way religion promulgates the past. There was a little girl in a long denim skirt went door to door for Christ. Her father, a pastor. Her mother saw the end of the world, all the way from Bedford, Indiana to Oskaloosa. Iowa is more than farming animals and calm. Sometimes our past unscrews our shoes. You step this way, that. Have taken strides away from Bible-Belt life. One buckle. Two. How were you and I born into the same breath? Why this incarnation here, now?
Mary Ann says Victor is more than ghosts. The Ashanti Mining Company stoking Rocky Mountain gold all the way back to Johannesburg, lugging it out of the bones of the many-soaked. Miners coughing dust as if two packs of Luckies a day. Backwards, the lines try to survive. Slavs in Pueblo. Ludlow Greeks. The German dead of Victor. Dead, dying, decried. Masked. As if. As if morality was not a play. Right and wrong never performed. As if Euripides was not an Athenian. He saw the veins of men as a net the gods made to catch us in like wild beasts, the poet wrote. And was right. Here, now. Just five miles southeast of Cripple Creek, this town can’t walk. Five miles from where it gave the gold and built a name. Gave all its blood and hurt. This place of graves. M.M. Demeree. Ella Porter. Minnie Denson. Two dogs named Shep. Donkey dust of mules gone quick over the sluicey ledge. The horse part of the mule all panic-ear and twitch. We have been made by truly two, multiples of moaning dust. We have been children far too long. You still walk door to door inside your most private. Test this latch and that. Lug the donkey dust of your father’s church into how and why you cry. I, too, flinch at the voice of strain. Parents who no longer loved, even themselves. Who in feeling unloved just tried to survive. Strange mouthings of almost-human pain. Dry and tight in the shy animal spine. This raccoon or that. Fox blood in our sleep. Possum our mouths out with toads. Mary Ann calls it quaint. The old Victor Hotel. This ghost-town most. A town of 445. Only a brothel-turned-breakfast joint. One rail of men who exhaust the mine, hunched at the bar called The Young Buck. And all those boarded doors. News-papered glass. Ranch-hand sad. 10,000 feet, you’d think, would be closer to the Lord of Hosts. Like a lantern that in losing its grip tips heaven light to hay.
We are all burning up inside for mine-dusting the light. Your father was a church. Does well, you say, with grief. My mother and father and I divorced at age three. One-one thousand, two. Children’s games are voice. Count the seconds about to be our lives. Why this life for us this life now? You and I destined to meet? Victor doesn’t stand for Victory but for the man who tossed his name into a hat. We should all be so lucky to be christened by chance. Backwards, we turn to our past for shoes. Step inside. This foot, that. Walk with our maculate hands. Drag our monkey-knuckled self to the mineral shelf. The Western Federation of Miners is dead as a thrown-bolt latch. Strike, struck, strucked. Conjugate the match. Friction the boot. Drag the sulfur up through the sole of the foot into our most fretful stance. Secondsay the heat. We are here, Michelle—ingots of ignoble birth, brilliants of light then dead. The strange mouthings of fish. Mimes caught in the pant. Fossilized and fixed. The sea-gone groan. Found in this town. Found only in rock in the search for gold. Dynamite-blast and pick-axe stance. The strange strained wraithings of now.