Poetry
The Birds Cannot Disappear
George Kalamaras
Green in the shape of a fluid vowel.
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A radiowave that eases out of the thorax of a stunted voice.
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Monks at a lamasery creating heat-waves around their naked bodies lying in snow.
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Friendly advice, below, on wood grains from cabbages of sound.
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A golden beak protruding as chains from a cruel blood-face.
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Hamlet's hair curling the bird's ruby neck.
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To be a bird man in emerald ponds attacking a floating pear.
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To be a beloved tree without ground, cast from its garden sound.
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To be a blossoming lull luff in Andean spring.
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The condor has traded its wings for water.
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The orange, for tanager stew.
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Oh, to fly like a fig scrunched through cholic gill-fire.
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To melt snow with coils of chordal thought.
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To say with conviction, I am a split pear, I am a split pear.
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And ask a floating oak for sound advice.
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Green, the vowel of every schraping ground.
—for Max Ernst