By George Kalogeris

That slender, dusty volume. When I was a student
Roaming the poetry aisles in search of a voice,
And never again so moved to open a text—
If only because its hundred-year-old pages
Had never been cut. That minor British poet.
So minor I can’t remember his name, though I took
His book home, and parted his late Victorian poems,
One by one, with the edge of a razor blade.

Nameless shade, I can’t unseal your lips—
But decade by decade, and ever more fervently, 
You speak to me from the gloom. Not even the epic
Poets, returning from the underworld,
Know what it means to be mute. Then back you go
In your slender jacket that couldn’t keep off the dust.

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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 anthol- ogized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010). He was the winner of the 2018 James Dickey Prize for Poetry.