poems by rachel kellum
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Listen
The world requires doing and noise.
And when doing slows,
and sound,
sound moves around inside. We want
to follow
where it goes and get
lost in a decade old desire—
blue eyes
just before the mourning dove
kiss, or
in the mist of the next decade when no
young boys
will thump through
the silence
holding them like a mother who listens
and knows why
there is war in the world.
We cannot
stop it, and neither can she,
these ornaments of silence, ringing.
We can only notice spaces
between, silence
underneath,
hold them,
release.
Quincy Grass
One eternal morning of childhood, the sun begins
to sift haze above the Mississippi River
before trees grab the lowering light. Not far away,
in a small subdivision full of muddy lots waiting
for houses and supplying children with the dirt clod
that will, tomorrow, bust open one boy’s eyelid, a little girl,
the youngest of three children –the fragile, coddled one—
hunches in her pilled pink polyester nightgown over a small
fur-lined nest of baby rabbits at the bottom of the hill
behind her home. They look like the bottoms of her father’s
Sunday naptime toes, nestled tight: absurd toes
with closed eyes, greasy transparent ears, tiny feet.
She gently strokes the back of each one. It is quiet.
Suddenly she is afraid. There is a stand of trees
behind her, shading where she squats in wet grass,
and beyond that, a long brick house holding her mother
vacuuming, or wiping from the kitchen table the dab
of milk beneath her cereal spoon, or looking out
the kitchen window above the sink, wondering where
Rachel has run off to. There she is. The girl pads barefoot,
panting openmouthed up the hill, through the sliding glass
door of the walkout basement, up carpeted stairs
into the dining room. “Mommy! There are baby bunnies!
They are pink!” Her mother folds the wet cloth lengthwise
three times and drapes it over the long silver faucet. She insists
Rachel wear slippers. Together they walk across green lawn
around the trees. When she sees the rabbits tucked so helplessly,
obviously, into a burrow of grass in the middle of the yard,
she tells Rachel, “Don’t touch them, honey, so their mother
will come back.” And Rachel knows then that she has killed them.
She doesn’t tell her mother as they walk hand in hand
through the house’s shadow, back up the hill that is only large
because she is so small. Later that afternoon, when she sneaks
out on bare tip toe to look at them once more, the nest is empty.
Her brow creases. She peers across the taller grasses beyond the edge
of lawn, but can’t see down deep. She studies the roots of the trees.
They are nowhere. Twenty nine years later, three days
after Rachel’s little sister dies of cancer, and before she is lowered
into a water-filled grave, her mother drives away. The mud
is carpeted with two long rectangles of perfect sod. Driving
past the old house with her three children, Rachel sees the hill
is only a gentle slope, though it once went down forever.
3 Oct. 2010
Becca’s birthday
there is some life somewhere living itself without me.
there is some life somewhere living itself without me.
it is the one
in which my eleven year old son has never said you make me
want to kill myself.
it is the one
in which i always let stillness,
silence and spaciousness move, speak and think me.
it is the one
in which my lover knows when we are done
with the lemon dill chicken, his doing the dishes means
thank you.
it is the one
in which he holds me in just this way
whether or not the children are around,
in order for me to meet
the next week a whole woman, not a woman of holes.
it is the one
in which i wake up, rise from bed with grace
and quiet mind toward sleeping children,
warm water, blue bowls of milk.
it is the one
beneath all this, already seeded, buried too deep in soil
to find light, or,
it is the one
sprouted, but i’ve forgotten where i planted it,
and the weeds have grown up so high i’m lost, parting leaves,
cutting my arms on blades of green, looking, looking.
Three Songs in E for Mojo
I. In the mouth of an all-black and white-tipped dog
The morning on the mountain she tried to run off with my son’s placenta, recently buried under a pine seed, by then breaded black with soil, flapping up and down with every joyful bound of her puppy feet, I knew she had come to teach me about loyalty. Not her loyalty to me, which comes so easily, but mine to her after the slap of her eating a part of me, an aged organ I grew to feed a baby. That it fed her, too, made me snap into two sticks of anger. I kicked her twice. I’m ashamed to say it now. Please forgive me. I had been too proud. But by the end of my then twenty-ninth year, her first, I had listened to enough stories to know she was cousin to Coyote and Raven, had come to pull the solid, serious earth of my birth ritual out from under me and laugh. She dug up the mossy dark belief I had grown to grow me, the need for my body to be holy, and showed me that even I am only meat.
II. Living her last life as a dog, a mirror
Eight or fifty-six years later, mornings in a plains town before heading to work and from three children, missing mountains, lost in the high desert of my own cactus longings, I’d sit on a round cushion trying to be in my life and breathe. Mojo, amber-eyed, would sit crooked on her bad hip, a foot away, look me unblinking in the eyes, black nose wetting mine, and breathe, waiting in her own longing. To eat. To pee. For my fingers to find her waxy silk ears and knead.
III. Also, because I nearly always forget the plastic sack
Now, more and more, instead of sleeping we walk streets. Not alleys, where goatheads pierce her feet. Not sidewalks, where she is prone to stop hard and fast, so suddenly, miraculously heavy over scent, a leaden shadow over the base of neighbors’ trees. Mojo, please! Come! I lean on the leash, my need to move outweighing her need to smell stale pee. The street keeps us focused on walking, her toes clicking me back and back to here, to my smiling pink tongued midnight on a black leash. Here, to this small tarred street under almost stars. Here, to this god who has fed me her heart for eleven, for seventy-seven years, a bit short of leg for an almost lab, as Bhanu said, but lovely.
Tapihritsa/Liberation
When the thing you wanted becomes the thing
you don’t want, and the thing you didn’t want
becomes the thing you want, you begin to see
problems do not live in things, but in wanting
and not wanting. If you could throw away
your jewelry, let down your long hair, burn
your clothes (you’ve seen blue jeans burn red)
and sit unadorned in your own invisible colors,
all things could dance through you without a snag.
You would almost smile, but not quite, and the mouths
of the earth would pray to you for insight. You
would grant nothing and everything. The two
are the same in the way wanting and not
wanting are the same. It is best to simply offer
your utter nakedness to those who
wear the clothes you left behind.
On the way home
My mountains are these clouds.
Treeless fields of sage
my high desert sea.
Each pry the same opening.
The gap that spreads quietly
as late August yellow,
refusing to entertain
but claiming me.
another way of looking at a black bird
-for the raven over Pearl Street and especially Karen Chamberlain
After thirteen years,
I finally understand
the raven’s word.
Awe! Awe! Awe!
Look! Isn’t that the sun
it carries in its beak?
Isn’t that the dawn
in my own dark belly?
If I put the camera down, I see
My boys try on attitudes
of bodies in water.
The newly eleven on the diving board,
a slight hesitation, a running to the edge,
a throwing of flesh into whatever
molten star shape five limbs can make
before smacking water, before mouth
flashing light, before Awgh!
Next, the monk waddle. Hands
in prayer at breast,
then the innocent fall.
And the almost eight sits quietly
astraddle the alligator’s eyes
while bigger boys climb and pull.
He is proud not to fall off, jaw set
to stay astride while they battle,
cheeks pinching nylon, peeking
out from trunks. He hugs low,
alligator jockey, ear plugs
still in place, protecting tubes,
his last two. The others float
see-through somewhere in the pool.
I love this body
the way it things and flattens.
The way its desk is a mess
today, but not always.
The way it cries when
an old woman can dream
of making love to a limping
young man and rewind in slow
motion and fast forward in slow
motion a man making love
to a woman he realizes is not
a woman, not sure what she is,
and falling compelled toward
her in a taxi anyway. This body
could touch itself, but won’t,
awaiting its lover, love. This body
whose breasts have fed
and sag and wait for kiss,
tongue, lips, fingertips. Its hair
keeps growing without it knowing
it grows. The body shaves and trims it,
plucks. This play of skin and hair and limb
and organsong. In tune and out,
sometimes eating hotdogs and gods.
Whatever I is wants
to wake up here, hear
the mumbling hundred eight pigeons
on the cornice of the abandoned blonde
brick school, see pixels through wings
of the mayfly in July, remember Joseph Brodsky,
feel its liver creak with wine made by
its ex-husband given with hopeful sad eyes,
watch people watching through lenses, stop
wanting change and loving this all at once.
Or doing both with bliss. So new, it reaches
for a light switch that has never been
in the same old house in which it lives.