George Kalamaras, former Indiana Poet Laureate (2014–2016), is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne where he taught for thirty-two years. He is the author of twenty-seven collections of poetry—eighteen full-length books and nine chapbooks. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, AGNI, Boulevard, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry (Chicago), and numerous others, including Greek and Greek-American magazines like Mondo Greco, Poetry Greece, and Ergon. He has received many awards for his poetry, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, two Individual Artist Grants from the Indiana Arts Commission, and others. Most recently he won the 2024 Indiana Book Award for Poetry. George Kalamaras lives in Livermore, Colorado.
St. Dionysios Steps Each Night from His Coffin on the Ionian
Island of Zakynthos to Guide the Sailors Home Safe from the Sea
Now we turn to the way miracles work. We urge them
unto our tongue. We ache of them in mouth.
We ask that we speak no longer in words but only
in the mystery of the Sea. Yesterday, I was turning
the pages of a very large book. And I felt
a turning inside me. As if the book was reading me.
And my past rose up like a future. Like one of many
futures bobbing on the waves of the horizon.
No, the astrologer in her scarves could not foretell.
Nor the I Ching coins on the desk. The yarrow stalks
next to them in that tiny velvet bag with the string.
Nor the cowry shells sprayed out upon the canvas map.
Nor all the runes and bones of the dead. Not even
the icons that began to weep. But the wind
rose inside me. St. Dionysios there all the way
from my grandfather’s island. Seaweed each morning
on his slippers. In his coffin. His mummified
remains carrying the salt scent of the Sea.
And I lit a candle—even here, hundreds of miles
from Greece. Lit a candle unto another candle.
Praising the light multiplying itself, entering us mysteriously
as we emerge at birth from the woman’s dark, screaming
and weeping to crawl back in. And praised
the darkness therein from which we all came—
the Great Khaos, the Primordial deeps, swirls
of sea-foam green. As if it were the Sea.
And only the Sea itself and me.
Pantoum for Pandelis Prevelakis
But I am Greece,
do not hurt me.
—Pandelis Prevelakis
Let’s say you choked on the first flower.
Your holy island of Crete gave birth
to Kazantzakis, Chortatzis, and Rhea Galanaki,
and you knew the petal of every poem, blossomed or bruised.
Your island of Crete wholly gave birth
to salt, pomegranate, and cypress trees.
And you knew the petal of every poem, blossoming and bruised
as if you had fallen inside, Pandelis, into your own dark seed
of salt, pomegranate, and trees. Cypresses held the breeze
coming in from Algeria, dust storms of dry mouth threatening you mute.
As if you fell into your own dark seed, Pandelis,
there was a stillness and sounds like death dispensing life.
When dust storms came to mute you in an Algeria of dry mouth,
you asked what was Cretan, what was Greek.
Death still sounded like a dead dispensation of life
like when it rains only rain raining down.
What was Cretan, you asked, and what was Greek,
puzzled to be on an island somehow belonging yet removed.
Like when it rains only rain raining down,
and you finally decided to allow your mouth
to puzzle out belonging to an island far removed.
So many poets whispered into your left ear
when you finally decided to allow your mouth.
And you brought them forward, blending their words with yours.
So many poets whispered into your ear, leaving
you to decide, decode, and decry.
And you brought them forward, blending their words with yours
in ways the plants inside you pulsed and bloomed.
You decided to decode and decry
Kazantzakis, Chortatzis, and Rhea Galanaki
in ways the plants inside you pulsed and bloomed.
Let’s say you choked on the first flower.
Giorgos Likos Slurps the Wind During Ten Years of Sleep
There are sea birds in the Cyclades, on the island of Sifnos, that know Giorgos Likos by name. Names such as Slurp This Wind and Catch a Bee Swarm in Your Throat and Poet of the Poised Beret. So many names he had, returning from Paris and André Breton’s embrace. Names suffused with dark Aegean light. Hidden in the underwing of a crow, a kingfisher beak, a shrike’s tiny pulsing tongue. What was underneath the beret of Giorgos Likos only the wind knew, as it tried to lift and shake the poems it perceived roiling out of his dreams. His dream, death dream. His slurp of wind, a bee storm in his throat. So many nights he walked the stones of Sifnos asking to know what the sea knows. To be surrounded by such sparkling sea-anemone green, he thought, is a way into the hidden depths of the chest. And moments of peace he might find otherwise only in dream.
He’d been told him to hold his mouth shut tight when the night wind enters the left ear, while the right ears hears Circe calling for him to crash to the rocks. Sometimes we’re not just pigs. Sometimes we’re a dog wanting to go out, he thought. Other times we simply lie by the door wanting to sun ourselves. Even at midnight. These are the things that troubled him, that didn’t add up. The things Likos heard when he could not sleep, that brought him back to the shoreline of his birth. The possibility of being swallowed whole by a seafaring past while being held still in the mysterious holes of the sea. The northern mountains somehow appearing south. The easterly winds, west of ground seashells from Odysseus’s ten years of sleep. This sleep, his sleep. The way a word by chance—that hasped and blurred slipped-speech of grief—might loosen the dark parts of the night, leaving his dream world unhinged. Might tear itself apart and tug forth the pulsing blue tongue of the sea.
Poetry in this post: © George Kalamaras
Published with the permission of George Kalamaras