Lying in bed, I see the digital blood
of the clock turn 3:17 a.m.

Outside, a train is screaming all the way
to South Bend. And onward, scraping through the rusty night
to Calumet City and Chicago.

And below that sound is the exchange
of a murmuring owl and a bawl-mouthed hound
somehow shaking the leaves of a giant oak
here in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Inside this room, inside the rheumy rooms
of my blood, are sixty-nine years of fierce weather
pummeling my sleep, longing for the canker sores
of my life to salve over and heal.

This is the way I speak, moving from this grief to that.

I know my hands have learned the worming of the dirt.
I know that a white sycamore has turned
into a river. And a river has broadened into my blood.
And the driftwood of the sky has become the unhinged boards
of barns lazy on the horizon
crying out like tightly wound cabbages
suddenly scalded with wind singeing open
their leaves.

I am convinced that I am a bastard pup
faithful to my redbone hound dog mother, certain
I was thrown from the loins of an amorous
bluetick who keeps ignoring me
back in Arkansas or Tennessee.
My future can be read in the chronicle
of my life already documented in the diary
leaves of the oak outside my window
and the jittery milk of mice skittering therein.

Outside, the hound dog keeps calling the moon
down into the mournful manner of my mouth
where water forsakes water, and the floodgates
close on what could be said. And should.

There, the world is pond-bobbing on a string
tied to the frenum of my own mouth.
And the moon is some beached fish.
Its long bone lodged in my throat.

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana, is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He is the author of nearly thirty books of poetry. He has received many prizes for his work, the most recent of which is the 2024 Indiana Book Award in Poetry for his To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me. After living many years in Indiana, he now resides in Livermore, Colorado, in the mountains northwest of Fort Collins, with wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Blaisie.

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