The Rain That Doesn’t Reach The Ground

George Kalamaras’s The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground is the latest installment of the poet’s forty-five year history with the American West: from having lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, full-time during most of the 1980s, to living an hour northwest in Livermore (near the Wyoming border) many summers since, to spending a summer in Big Timber, Montana, on the trail of locales visited by his belovèd Richard Hugo, to retiring from teaching in Indiana after thirty-two years and living six months a year in both Indiana and Colorado, to-finally-pulling up stakes in Indiana and settling full-time back in Colorado at 7,600 feet in elevation on Green Mountain in Livermore. This enduring embrace of Colorado and the West has lent Kalamaras perspective not only on his adopted homeland but also on the significance of his Indiana roots, a landscape some might think pales in comparison but to Kalamaras offers the experience of the rich animal life and Indiana woodlands he adores as entrée into a deeper relationship with the natural world in Colorado. Like his poems about hound dogs, The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground delves into some of the poet’s most personal and intimate reflections on life, spirit, the wisdom of animals, and living in harmony with one’s surroundings. This book is a meditation on place-whether it be a region one is preparing to leave or a place one has begun to inhabit with ever-deepening attention.

Sample:

Driving Across the Great Plains

And each small town. Each small town

keeps crawling me back, carving itself

through itself. Cutting into the Indiana tree bark

of my bones as a supposed way home.

Say I call out every day, by God, to myself.

Say I’m lost like the sound of gravel

in the shallows. Say I am the texture of wind

in the mouth, slowly easing out

back unto the world. The sun. The sun comes up

across these plains. The moon bleeds back the night.

Flakes of snow keep saying Colorado,

even as I pass-miles and miles east-

Nebraska towns like Sidney and Broken Bow.

I’ve called. Called out to the dead.

I’ve called and combed my voice

over and again through the buffalo

grass. Rolled it, mud-blotched, into the river bottom

where all things are beautifully said. Sad.

Where the wind goes slack in evening

lanterns lit by moths. I didn’t feel

things. Didn’t feel the earth

for a long time. Still, I kept driving west,

past Ogallala and Julesburg, telling myself

the mountains would surely stop me.

And I felt whinges of wind, both behind me

and before, mimicking me as I clenched

with each breath I took to reassure myself

I had done my best. That I had done

all I possibly could. That the cottonwoods

each autumn fed the North Platte

bags of their brilliant gold. That the land I was eating

was eating me with each mile

I pursued, each leaf somehow falling

into me and through.