George Kalamaras
How in the Dark
with a first line by Robert Duncan
How in the dark the cows lie down.
Their sleep is water, the death we sense in the wrist.
How the hound dogs circle and scratch forth
a bed, content to be loved by so much love.
Content to be loved, by so much, they gather
their bed in the fringy rug-folds
seen in the man’s eyes. How each eye.
How each sees the living blood in the blood pheasant’s
wing. And sets forth on the long inward sound
in fields asleep in the grass in the cows’ contentment.
The long sound traveling in, of sheep, mute,
in the bobcat’s mewling. Yes, the world keeps
folding into itself, even as it blossoms out. Yes,
I hear the hound and hear and almost sound.
The stirring in the gut. The aging ache. Years folding back
into the pump house ivy. The mulberry tree staining, still,
the mouth as if woodsy night existed
only to crawl us back, through old logs and poison oak,
sumac and scorched switchgrass, to exhibit
the gaps as if the contented bellies
of hounds in front of woodstoves and smoke remain
full and large and slow in their juices
so that I may learn to lie down among them, slow,
in my watery self, and one day feel the same.
Sometimes, the Animal
The dog whose man beat him is visited
by angels today. Not the death kind
but the family whose boy wants to adopt.
They saw him in the paper and felt a stirring,
as if the part of their life that was gone
might be coming back. The ectoplasm
the hound sent out, with just a look,
could move mountains, even geography
less clichéd. Endless trains outside Fort Wayne
shiver and shift, as if their couplings track
away the cold. Where the lines lead, only
Toledo knows. And only in the lonely dark.
The coonhound whose dark the man tried to beat out
of himself came a long short-way west, from Dayton
or Yellow Springs. And the summer that turned
into fall was a gift of dead leaves
that finally made things right. The insinuation
of a thousand cuts suggests the way we all ache
inside, though the dog’s scars are unseen.
Moth-eaten paragraphs could be written
again and again in his mangy fur,
as if what is missing sometimes could be
a waning moon whinging west. The hound’s slobber
is enough to say open-mouthed joy
at being looked at with love is what we all need.
Because our best selves will abandon our worst.
And a dark green house at the end of the street
could finally be the kind of dark we call home.