poems by rachel kellum
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Sand Burial
Before tractors buried my father
who would have loved to watch the work
of those machines, earthmovers, like himself—
the way good men pulled levers to lift his vault lid,
suspended like a Frank Lloyd Wright cantilever
hovering over the eternal balcony of death,
that bardo where inside marries outside,
and lowered one end perfectly above him
until one lip slipped into the vault’s rim
and made the opposite end quaver
(That’s how you know male meets female,
the undertaker said with pride in his men,
artists, he called them, for knowing
the subtle arts of the trade: See, that’s when
they know the concrete seam will seal, their signal
to lower the lid the rest of the way)—
I stood with Sam in his grandpa’s Quicksilver cap,
grey hairs and spiced sweat still in the band,
threw fistfuls of Utah sand into the hole
then shovelfuls, to finally let his chronic absence go,
resurrecting now the memory of that day my father
fished small grains of Illinois sand from my red eyes
with tissue he had wadded to a point,
that tenderness, the lingering sting.
two pruning haiku
dusty pungent stalks
last year’s crop of Russian sage
fall to my quick blades
* * * * *
sneeze, gather white twigs
living ten of wands woman
my burden is light
Fluxus Score: Instructions for a Couple Over Unknown Duration
1.
Observe his plate of tater tots
while you wait to pray.
Listen to his heavy stream across the house
the water course through pipes
his feet return, full of him. Pray.
2.
Sit in silent witness
of creosote collecting
on the wood stove pane.
Take turns placing your palm
on each other’s thigh.
3.
Nearly halfway
through duration
begin cold plunging.
Gasp together until
a calm carries.
3.
Giggle and kiss each other once again
just to upset the whimpering dog
who wants a kiss goodbye, too
every morning, not jealous of him
but you who gets his first kiss.
4.
Each of you, nearly alternately
lay a log on the fire when coals begin
to die, open the flue until flames rise.
Keep each other warm like this
until your last winter.
5.
Notice when the other
makes the bed, sweeps
cooks, waters seeds
takes out trash.
Say something.
6.
Moan into each other’s ears.
7.
Walk the short loop,
the mid loop, the long loop
for as long as the dog lives.
Notice together or alone
the walk takes you home.
Lines Before Dawn
When the house is no longer simply a place where I wake
to get ready for work, a launch pad to a school—
and instead, by leisure, has become a dark sky twinkling
constellations of sleeping machines, bright clusters
of red, white, green and blue lights, and I have wandered
into my youngest grown son’s room to find a black hole
where no light switches or charging phones glow—it is time
to step out onto the peeling deck with my forgotten feet,
thin socked, my mother’s silent, soft blanket wrapped around me.
No swishing materials of my body to steal peace, I look up.
Deep space offers its trail of ancient smoke and tiny stars.
Planets I can’t name are aligned, planets I learned earlier online.
There they are. Two meteors draw their lines across the night
like a sweet girl drawing then erasing her marks.
Size 14 Secret Security
Her love has left his giant boots
in the foyer
for as long as she’s known him.
Clutter, she always thought,
another thing to put in order
until the day he told her
he leaves them where
the window in the door
affords a view to a warning.
Nasturtiums
Even wrathful beings start out small—
in this case, like tiny, dehydrated testes,
white and wrinkled, promising
protection despite your lack
of faith. You can’t believe it
when green coins form, shallow bowls
for single rain drops. Such pools
foretell pestilence—the crystal balls
of lady bugs and praying mantises
hunkered down in wait, watching
blood red, orange and yellow
blooms unfold themselves like warm
aureoles, ladies’ fans, lips laced
with pepper—so festive, so sharp
on a salad, a human tongue, so repugnant
to aphids and flies they’ll take
their colonizing fleet elsewhere,
to your naïve neighbors’ garden,
buzzing their national anthem all the way.
Spring Beauties
Look, Momma, sping booties, sping booties!
~Sage Magdelene, age 3
It is not Groundhog Day exactly.
There are major mistakes to right. I cannot.
No endless re-tries or deadening repetitions.
No escape. It is just these seven small rooms,
full of the dust and scent of living—coffee,
salty sheets, cut pine, March dog, wood smoke.
It is these sandy trails where daily I greet
my own shoe tread of yesterday,
notice my gait, step off-register, new.
It is the real smile in my love’s morning eyes,
that softness he reserves for me, my hands.
It is my body remembering three toddlers’
heft in night dreams, that sweet grief.
It is the checking of screens for evidence
of their fractal lives spinning presence
off of me, our curving Mandelbrot set
of mothers, my first grandchild sprouting.
It is the digital taking-in of their encounters
with simple, complicated, horrible beauty,
that glimpse of what they do, now grown,
with epigenetic inheritance, that best thing
I had to give. Look, I would say. Look.
This little pink flower, this bliss, this thick sadness,
this roaring rage, let’s look at it together,
squat before it pink and green on solid feet,
shake songs from chromosomal chains and winter.
Let’s sigh, touch the fragile petals.
They won’t stay long. Look, there they go.
Reclining Piñon
The piñon reclines parallel to earth like Manet’s Olympia—
stark, of service, sturdy, propped up on her own stripped limbs.
A full length of bark has died along the south side of her trunk,
left her core exposed, sun-bleached. The north side is rich
with thick bark, pulling life from roots still clutching arroyo wall.
Unlike Olympia, she is not bored when I, a john of sorts,
stand before her. She doesn’t care I am mixing metaphors
in the attempt to get out of my head, into my old body.
Above, green needles spread across a low canopy I can sit beneath.
Like a child on a still swing, I could perch on the horizontal trunk,
clutch branches like two cold chains, kick my legs to nowhere, pretend
this is a bonsai and I am so much smaller than I am. I could
rub against its cave of hard roots, half exposed, shed my tube of skin,
leave a transparent face dangling in the gentle wind.