George Kalogeris’s most recent book of poems is Winthropos, (Louisiana State University, 2021). He is also the author of Guide to Greece (LSU), a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos, and poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets. His poems and translations have been anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). He is the winner of the James Dickey Poetry Prize.
Selections from Winthropos, Winner of the 2023 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize
BABY MONITOR She’s sound asleep. Or her Alzheimer’s is. I can hear Each breath she takes through the monitor I keep On my desk, hooked up as it is to the one upstairs, Beside her bed. The kind of listening Device that’s used for keeping track of infants. The tremulous speaker could fit in the palm of your hand. A little green light pulses every time It picks up any trace of my mother’s voice. Babble of baby talk and muffled whimpers. Those garbled bits expelled from her speech machine, Its plastic speaker propped all night on its stand, Calling out softly some rhythmical ruminant something So automatic it might be dreaming out loud, In my mother’s oblivious voice—O Sibylline Machine that makes the incomprehensible clear: “…and please help her…and please guide him… and stop It from spreading to the kidneys, please, dear Lord… And make that enough to meet their mortgage payments…” I’m privy to a prayer that no one else Can hear. At least tonight. Some primal psalm Where all are nameless, but none of them forgotten. And please and please and please goes the little green pulsing light. TALKING TO MYSELF ABOUT POETRY Whatever you do, do not give up on it. Keep listening for someone walking behind you— However faint those footfalls they’re not unheard. Trust that your language, lost in the deep dark wood Of your larynx, will find another poet’s guidance To read you back to yourself, and break the silence. Just saying: “My heart was in my mouth, Meroúla” Sings back the nightingale in your mother’s voice. Whatever you do, do not give up on it. At the end of another day with the page still blank Yet the low horizon ablaze like consummate art, Who doesn’t believe their lines aren’t worth a straw? Nobody. Dream on, Nobody. At the end of the day, Ocean still echoes in earshot of open shells. Rosy-fingered dawn is under your eyelids. So your words are dead to the world. Let them lie there True to themselves. As far from the teeming swarming Inconceivable hives of Mount Hyméttus The poem to come may seem, just one not too Mellifluous hum and there they are, the lyric Honeybees. It may be tonight they glaze Your sleeping lips with honey of Mount Hyméttus. Dream on like disillusioned sweetly intoning Antonio Machado: music for a mule Pulling a waterwheel in a dusty circle. Dream on. You are a tired animal With blinders on, but nothing is clearer than water Rising and falling in Andalusian song. Remember that Poetry was there for you In your darkest hour, that noche oscura when you Were twenty-four, and suddenly fatherless. It’s when you started writing verse, in earnest. Whatever you do, do not give up on it. Keep reading Seamus Heaney and Juan de la Cruz.
BIRDS IN CEMETERIES It must be the shade that draws them. Or else the grass. And it seems they always alight away from their flocks, Alone. It’s so quiet here you can’t help but hear Their talons clink as they hop from headstone to headstone. Their sharp, inquisitive beaks cast quizzical glances. The lawn is mown. The gate is always open. The names engraved on the stones, and the uplifting words Below the names, are lapidary as ever. But almost never even a chirp from the birds, Let alone a wild shriek, as they perch on a tomb. And then they fly away, looking as if They couldn’t remember why it was they came— But were doing what our souls are supposed to do On the day we die, if the birds could read the words.
(purchase at https://lsupress.org/books/detail/winthropos/)