Clade Song 6
Clade Song 6 Left

Clade Song 6

Herds of Darkness

 

I went to the Kitagami Valley searching for a herd of darkness.
It would please me to be attached to a visible wheel, to become some pond-scum pest.

A gorgeous dug-out acacia absorbed giraffe-branched moonlight.
I can talk to my shirt, in the woodsmoke of plaid, and still fear the quaking Indiana dust.

We opened the owl and found tiny bismuthic seeds.
All that labor was embarrassing when we neglected our names beneath a granular sky.

All right, I have heard of that enormous hole we create with constant want.
Still, isn’t our desire partially fueled by two hundred bundles of thawing mist?

The terrible pathway somehow exposed the highs and lows of living in this valley or that.
The herds of darkness attached their evening selves to us. Time and again they trampled              loose the stiff givings of the chest.

 

 

 

 

 
Clade Song 6 Right
Kalamaras2

George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of fifteen  books of poetry, eight of which are full-length, including Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011) and The Mining Camps of the Mouth (2012), winner of the New Michigan Press Prize. He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.