George Kalamaras

                         Entering the Corridors of Breath

                                                          “Not to die but to be re-born.”

                                                                       —Jimi Hendrix

The place between the eyebrows is a path

of sound where moonlight begins.  A slow rain rises

and falls in a storm that works toward its

limits: earth, body, land.  The dark sea

of leaves draws the willow far down

into the sinking breath, where you begin

again, Jimi, to rise in a September dusk

the lift of a goose-wing sheds over fields

in the sleeper’s forehead.  A sudden snow-

bank that holds the wolf’s slow step keeps

the landscape always drifting north toward

the earth, toward the earth’s axis.  A small sound

measures the moist shape between a person’s breath

and the flesh it seeks, breaking through water,

through the other side of a chant’s exile,

through the pyramid you drew that day before you

died, the number nine drawn down within itself

nine times, a merman’s descent.  But where to look

for heat?  How the hum of a stranger’s touch

at dusk pieces apart the patience of womb-

water?  Fallen roots blossom an electric

earth, a fragrant caravan that wanders off

over the bridge your blues beats through the hills

of Tibet, of Mars, the mountains within unknown

galaxies, a woman’s ancient hair.  On an island

she waits for you.  She strokes your belly, looking far

back through your past into swirling textures

of thought, into a lotus-leaf becoming, the way

wood slows to wheat, oil to water.  How soul meets

soul.  Soma, it is raining, Jimi.  Soma mani padma.

What floats over you in faint earth-howl

holds her left eye steady near your navel.

A thousand suns and moons spiral from inside

each breath the plants ease into the rocks.

The ten thousand things surge from stones.

Volcanoes rise in the sleeper’s lost blood.

What heat.  The humming clocks of harvest

grain a beat in the hidden symphony against

which a planetary wind defines itself, becoming

border.  Buddha-fields pour through trees,

the galaxies of reptile-embrace, a wind that cries

Mary, a wind where each breath begins

and ends and begins again, dropping a deeper

green in the grass before the falling leaves.