SurVision Magazine

Starlight Sinning in the Deaf Man's Ear


I lay among the camels, bathing in the soft blue starlight of another dawn.
Not another dawn, but the Mongolian rain in my belly.

It was like the story of pulling the Golden Lotus Woman's corpse from the angry river.
We will place a good strong stone in our mouth and pretend the crimson hue.

So many lives I've lived, like being the younger brother of Rubén Darío.
Nicaraguan bloodletting from my pharmaceutical cup.

Or when someone named Simone made sounds into my mouth, as she guided my hand
     across her voluptuous thigh, teaching me the words belly-blur and please.
And that time I only lived three days, thirteen hours, four minutes, thirty-seven seconds,
     refusing suck at the unwed breast of a Malaccan dawn.

Dear Book of Precision, dear Book of How to Win a Mongolian Pony Race, tell me how
     many times I have taken to The Steppes, fearing the Tartars in the barbaric
     encampment of my soul?
Tell me which lives I've led with dignity or blame.

That time I awoke not as a baby but as epinastic enzymes in the afterbirth of a camel foal.
There are herds that pass through me—as I write, as I sip the hot morning hoosh—
     yawnking and spitting the dawn down from dark to a deep dampening blue.





A Pattern of Dexterity


As to the dark red groan of green tea, I relinquish all thirst.
I even hand you back your stockings, choosing, instead, to sniff a fishnet of ground
     nutmeg.

Sometimes it's a long day, alone, without mussing myself.
Sometimes it's a life and a half before we kiss the marble floor that touched so many
     foreheads in the temple.

I am not speaking of a pattern of dexterity.
That would surely leave a hole in my how and why.

I am not talking of not talking.
That is to open the door thirteen times without encumbrance.

If you love me, improve it, like a crow might restate a pasture.
Improve it, like the woman who walks into the room.

The expiration date of the sycamore leaves is stamped in the ossicles of my inner ear,
     stapled to the little sound in my forefinger.
Open the door, turn left, and hand me a false epilobe, the medicinal plant we might eat to
     suffer the scrofula's release.





There is Never Any Need to Cry


There is never any need to cry for me.
Cry for the coffee grounds, poured onto the napkin, in the shape of the Milky Way.

We transform a grumble into a gunwale.
We mark our mouths with lime.

Time passes like a grasshopper's wings.
We know the rhythm of what we should know yet still examine our groins with strange
     fascination.

Did you find the terrestrial mountain shrimp inside the music of possible rain?
Might the hermit crabs scuttling in their crate offer a psychic weight that is somehow
     lighter than despair?

When you arrive, send me a postcard from a different port.
Carry it first, so that it contains a postmark from the next town over.

There are mutual galaxies vast as the rainy season in a rain-soaked sleeve.
That's why when it rains I feel finally whole.







George Kalamaras, a former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of fifteen books of poetry, eight of which are full-length, including Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (2000), winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series. He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.