SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Seven
GEORGE KALAMARAS
The Space Inside Rain
Next we take up the space inside rain.
Do you remember my previous death, the one from the floods?
The onset of blackwater fever was an optical sign.
No matter how many cables were sent, not a single peafowl could be saved.
What I have in my throat is a clumsy protectorate.
Someone drank my entire body, beginning with pocket lint.
The crutch collapses. I welcome you to the next world.
The African violet bends bluish-white as if there was never any music.
I become the ebullient washerwoman. I become Anushka, the Banaras woman at the fish
market with no shoes.
It is not colonization to imagine other wives, even if there is only one bed?
I now know the name for winter solstice.
I am a shoemaker mending boots through the long night with Jacob Boehme in a
lantern-lit cottage in a cobblestone village.
The space inside rain is as raw as a breakfast without lamps.
All kinds of tongues cannot depress Ganges floods from recurring.
We say our words. We mend them just right.
We are invisible for one day, walk among the gods, sunk into our shame.
The Distance Between the Coccyx and the Sacral
It was not in the script: a woman sucking her finger longingly, as if she was about to die.
I measured her feet from afar and knew she must have been purchasing illegal pigeons.
A bird begins to emerge whenever we reveal our multiple births.
I do not confide in the uninitiated. Their ears, as yet, are clogged with gnats.
Emerge. A bird emerges whenever we reveal the starling-severed hand.
One photographic granule of the Belgian Congo is enough to get me to clench every time
an armless man bends in a clothing store to inspect a shoe.
Then there was that previous life when we traded beads, dividing them equally, even
among the dogs.
Still, someone always felt cheated, as if the other's bedding contained somehow-softer
straw.
The time between incarnations is a sad glance.
The bones of the head vibrate and are silent.
Hand me the harmonica around the hobo fire.
Inscribe me my mouth.
The distance between the coccyx and the sacral can be immense.
The rain arrives as all rains do, fierce and full of mending.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Release the desire, even, for moon-fired owl flight.
There is a quiet like the long ending to a parade.
Branches of the Moon Drop Everything Small Through Me
Of the surviving copies of the original paintings, we know little.
The quality of body fragments is enough to facilitate our understanding—carbon dating
of the bones, drawn and imagined.
Branches of the moon drop everything small through me.
He, who somehow entered the scroll without our knowing, was collecting dust particles
with horsehair brush, beating the carpets apart in pursuit of lice and mites.
Who gave me three dead chickens, dealt a flexible fleece, the blow of botany through the
sensible sieve?
Who asked whether this mouth, this time around, might actually be enough?
If I refuse to carry the emotional weight of others, will they leave me sinking into a
long loneliness?
Or, will it be spontaneous hurt—the way one cuts a second heart of apple into an oak in
response to the grooved-juice of our mouths?
I don't care if I am permitted or verbally less-fractured, drawn minutely into a Chinese
landscape among the overwhelming abundant simplicity of pines.
I have no use for either-or's, only for the sound of the skin uncertain how to repair but
finding body fragments in drops of moon branching out into everything.
George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is the author of seventeen books of poetry, ten of which are full-length, including Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011), The Theory and Function of Mangoes (2000), winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series, and That Moment of Wept (SurVision Books, 2018). He is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
