George Kalamaras

CORYMBS


Of the various favorable tendencies, none is more important than sound.
We will make another crying life, tongue by electrical tongue.

We will everyday. We will poetry and its source.
Who will evening-mouth our burning school and all that hair?

Who will cattle-train the entire cliff-face with the foreknowledge of a bun?
We climbed the skeletal structure of a breeding bird.

We did not hear our own story, nor its resilient shy.
We were convinced we could never requiem our ash.

One kilometer away, a ruined tornado spiked three pours of quite milky silt.
It has now been several days, but the first set of linen somehow muslined my mouth.

This judgment, I confess, cannot account for the rough sound of a scream.
That, too, is music, and the ordinariness of replacing a cook with remnants of aloe 
      suggests how many scars I had to solve.

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.