[Realpoetik] GEORGE KALAMARAS [Part Two]

[RealPoetik Magazine]

BUT I NEVER WOULD

* *

* *

*When we got Asian dogs, we expanded to a king-sized bed*.

This is what the percolator slurped, grinding its sloshy morning grit.



*The most beautiful love is alive, lifetime to lifetime*.

I heard this, just as I woke to the fierce strutting of crows.



I know you don’t believe everything I write, how many times I’ve died.

How the belly plankton becomes you.  How our bodies in heat both crave salt.



I respect your blindness as I might the mail carrier’s slumped shoulder.

I greet her each morning so that she knows she carries something alive.



I could kill a summer swan, carve one layer of tender yellow fat as a
delicacy, and

      contemplate its swimming *and* its flight.

But I never could—nor *would*—because the swan is sacred throughout India.



Please, if you receive this message, pet the dog, expand your hand, replace
the bird in

      your chest one worm at a time, date this message forward three cat
lifetimes from

      now.

Consider this. What year that would be—whether you’ll be born again screaming
or

      weeping, weeping or just simply alive.




*George Kalamaras* is the author of thirteen books of poetry,
including *Symposium
on the Body’s Left Side*, *Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof*, *The Recumbent
Galaxy* (co-authored with Alvaro Cardona-Hine), and *Kingdom of
Throat-Stuck Luck*, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Contest. His most
recent is *Mining Camps of the Mouth*, winner of the New Michigan Press/*
DIAGRAM* Chapbook Contest. He is Professor of English at Indiana
University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.

-- 
RealPoetik
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