Walking the Night Woods, Taking the Darkness
into the Cells of My Body, I Realize All I've
Ever Realized Is Words Only and, Thus,
Only Part of Who I Am
And stood in a star-sparked meadow. And heard
lost parts of myself in the barred owl's screech,
thunder in the long wood. Cutover I
walked through. Deadfall in the hardwood river
bottom. Chokecherries. Ripple-wind. Marshy
maidenhair ferns among the hummock scrub.
Said I wished I. Said words that wouldn't work.
Said and said till I broke the saying whole.
Yes, I'm a hound-blur man. Scent is the way
I speak. Rabbit-scratch. Quail boiling out
of thicket cover. Fractured word-fracture
toward the primordial pull of pre-phrase
sound. Midnight as dawn in sugar maples.
Oak. In hound-dog snout taking in the ground.
_________________
George Kalamaras
What My Hound Dog
Is Scenting Through
the Sloughgrass Is a
Way of Scenting Me
Wolfson Press, 2023
