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.
Diogenes and the Death of Death
But I’ll tell you this: if I were not Alexander, I would be
Diogenes!
— Alexander the Great, as recorded
by Plutarch, Alexander, XIV
Diogenes slept in a ceramic jar.
He could retract his testicles
temporarily just to feel the life of a juvenile
squirrel. He walked the streets of Athens carrying
a lantern in broad daylight
claiming he was looking for an honest man.
And he memorized the diaries
of Thespis, hoping they would guide him
through our human tragedies and explain
the purpose of all the masks
making all the somber faces
jittery and dark.
When sleeping in his jar he dreamt
of dirt rising up to embrace him.
This pleased him. He wanted to worship at the foot
of whatever had been stirred by worm
burrowings and the dust kicked up
by so much human striving, the weight—he said—
of intensely steady feet. Daytime in the street
he could read his own palm and see things
his left hand would not
allow. His right palm, he claimed,
had spent more than one lifetime
quivering the Shades, even making death
afraid of itself. How the same lines
of that palm found him in a later incarnation
remains unknown. But when Alexander the Great
arrived in Corinth, Diogenes refused
to join the crowds and approach.
So Alexander, curious, sought him out
in his cypress grove—this dirty homeless man
of high regard and scorn—asking
if there was anything he wanted.
Diogenes simply replied Yes,
that you should stand a little out of my sun.
There are many such stories of mystery
and imagination. In ancient Greece,
a philosopher’s death was often seen
as his final teaching. Thus, many were confused
when Diogenes left the body. Legend says
he either committed suicide
by holding his breath, or died by an infected
dog bite or by eating raw octopus.
All we know is that he did die. Or at least
seemed to. And that we all die.
And must. Whether we know it or not
when the breaths cease.
And that many of us create religion, myth,
the way we earn our daily bread,
even the satisfied yawning
of a dish cleansed in the sink.
Thus, we seem to think
that the death of dying
is the highest release. Light
seeking light. Like a lantern
carried through the streets
in search of who invented death and why.
Yannis Patilis Drank the Blood of the Pomegranate
He wrote all the time. He wrote
while he ate bread, dipping it
in olive oil and oregano. He wrote while he pissed
in the woods, staring long
and lovingly at the moon.
He even wrote while he slept
in the owl’s throat, which somehow
cradled him, carrying him midnight
to midnight, swampy dark to swampy dark.
Writing was how Yannis Patilis
drank the blood of the pomegranate.
Spit out the seeds. Made sense
of the hardness and the dark. Of the talons
tearing at his chest. Of the feathery air
that sometimes lay pulsing
in his palm, eluding his grip.
When his brother died, he wrote a poem
that night—though not for his brother
but for the jazz giants whose music
kept carving the sky into him.
When the wind opened
flute holes in his bones, he wrote
his brother’s ghost whispers
into the dark. And the evening
his brother was cremated
he ate saganaki and wrote some more,
opening every pore of his body
to the grief-stricken grass
and the complex cullings of the moon.
He didn’t understand why. Could never
determine why each poem—even those he deemed
“failures”—was so important to who he was
and how. But each stanza, each line and word,
convinced him that somehow the flood
would never come, that the fires would cease.
That Athena’s owl
might—yes—still swoop down,
but in skimming the trees
and grazing his skin,
it would not be coming for him.
For other contributions by George Kalamaras, please follow the link below:
Poetry in this post: © George Kalamaras
Published with the permission of George Kalamaras