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 PlainsAnd each small town. Each small townkeeps crawling me back, carving itselfthrough itself. Cutting into the Indiana tree barkof 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 gravelin the shallows. Say I am the texture of windin the mouth, slowly easing outback unto the world. The sun. The sun comes upacross 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 voiceover and again through the buffalograss. Rolled it, mud-blotched, into the river bottomwhere all things are beautifully said. Sad.Where the wind goes slack in eveninglanterns lit by moths. I didn’t feel things. Didn’t feel the earthfor a long time. Still, I kept driving west,past Ogallala and Julesburg, telling myselfthe mountains would surely stop me.And I felt whinges of wind, both behind me and before, mimicking me as I clenchedwith each breath I took to reassure myselfI had done my best. That I had doneall I possibly could. That the cottonwoodseach autumn fed the North Plattebags of their brilliant gold. That the land I was eatingwas eating me with each mileI pursued, each leaf somehow fallinginto me and through.