Reading Kenneth Patchen Again

              
Propped on his side, a man in great pain writes:
“Our supper is plain but we are very wonderful.”
Oh what sort of world requires suffering to make
lovers so lovely?  Those whom the rainy beasts
visit in their beds are the truly blessed!
The children of tenderness eat from the hand
of the one whose face has gone to Paradise.

         

A Link to Poems by Dan Raphael

in the M Review

• Must All Things

• Cloud Pond

• Winter in the City

• Some Say the Year Begins in Ice
             

Poems by George Kalamaras

     
At the Ashram of Trailanga Swami
  
  

The temple priest tells you he cannot recollect
being a silk trader nine years ago in Delhi
        
but can recall every detail of his last incarnation
when he wandered Calcutta as a cow,
       
vowing never again to nuzzle trash
for cabbage leaves and lichi rinds.
   
A sweeper woman hunched into a stick
of incense confides with downcast eyes that she sees
      
God in every ringlet of smoke
but not in the curl of her daughter’s
      
hair or in the evening lust her husband returns
with, sweaty from river washing,
        
musk of some Brahmin’s shirt
still clinging to him. Does the body
        
bring one closer to
or further from oneself? The reaching
        
of a tongue into the salt of another
steady your craving or substitute
             
moaning for sound? Trailanga Swami
taught that OM could be heard
    
in every cell if one could but turn
the tongue toward the nectar
      
that drips from the back of the throat,
but how can one learn to move from the body
      
into that vowel? Into a temple
pool’s luminous flash of carp? Into liquid
        
flesh, perfect dissolve? You chant a secret
mantra, pour water over the massive Shiva lingam
                    
he retrieved 130 years ago from the bottom
of Ganga, touch its centuries of sexual longing
             
smooth from the clutch of many hands,
firm from cremation ash spinning electrons black
              
in your inner ear. Why is it you sometimes hear
a buzzing, get an erection when caressing bark
       
of a jack fruit tree, or when writing
a poem about a leopard, rich underbelly
               
of ribgrass? You bow to the statue
of the one you’ve come so far to feel,
                 
the great Trailanga. Dead for 100 years, he vibrates
still in the stone. Mounds of marigolds
       
flower his neck in fiery ropes, luminous
snakes unwound into higher regions
    
where sadhus swear a cool wind from below somehow comes
all the way to the throat as Kundalini’s hot scales
       
unwind in the spine. 300 pounds of saintliness,
you think, yet gravity could not hold.
         
All that is moving is still, the temple
priest confides, turning a cabbage leaf
           
in his left hand, and all that is still
continues. You see a swirling atom
     
in his finger. Wonder what about being a cow
had left him fixated on lichis. Consider
          
your own former lives—a monk, perhaps,
in a fourteenth-century English Abbey, an Athonian
  
Hesychast, a janitor in Alabama, a wandering sadhu,
some insect or other crucified in the curious fist
  
of a boy shamed by the word Georgie
or Georgette or Georgina. Recall the ant
    
who crossed your desk this morning, certain
its ash carried your name black as it sifted
    
each poem for vowels, the photograph
of a Calcutta yogi on leopard mat. Its left
  
antenna prodding each paw-print blotch
like a hummingbird purling fur
  
for sugar water. Depth of a lover’s tongue
urging spasms of salt. A leptoscope
  
probing black and white cells
for bright, red divine milk.
                    

     
                    
Beloved Star
  
   

Beloved star, the world could die
from so much scraping.
The chiropractic elm with its bent cradle.
Boys sensing the moon in the waists
of every young woman with a belly piercing.
       
So you inherited the watchful eye
of your beagle. Fly-swat
against the dark lamp
nailed one of your breaths shut
as if your lung closed some lid.
                      
A star could clasp a tree, lust
of every galaxy sparking the bark.
Your dog showing you the only true sound,
scent of cat-track through moss. 
         
The world could force love
out of even the saddest plant.
Great hostas smalling toward the ivy
as if inspecting a sudden fatigue
in the color green.
                 
So you’ve inherited the desire
to tongue another’s navel? To mouth
the sound, I would never kill a single thing
into a round, into a shallow star?
How could your own have ever fed you enough?
Firmed hair and bone? Filled you with blood
drawn in caves? Sun smear
of a bee entrail in dark rock?
Inside the crushed wing
of everything you tried to love
are young hands skilled with moss.
In moist belly pods,
a most minute lamp.
      
Bend your head below your knee.
Smell the sage
of sunken stars, inverted fire.
Kiss this sky.         
  

(from the online periodical Drunken Boat)