poems by rachel kellum
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Red Bead
It is never safe to assume
karma is through with you,
that all you have done
and do has been released
like a necklace spilling
beads across a floor.
You gather the beads,
re-string them while you sleep,
always a familiar,
pleasing pattern.
Oh, to sleep! This sleeping
storm that blows games through.
One game, you let it go.
You let it go. One name.
It rolls just within reach,
the red bead.
Again and again,
you have slipped
it in your mouth
between cheek and teeth,
your foray tongue
a muscled dream.
Try to spit it out,
the dead seed.
Wishing is not the same
as living or reprieve.
2012
Venus in Taurus at 3 a.m.
I, too, am a red light
lonely toreador caught dead center
in the horns of the bull
bucked about until my stories drop
until the shapes of beasts tossing gods
are only self-consuming suns
dazzling distant spheres
or better yet, quantum benders
rolled out across a dark bed.
Everything shines.
I’m done picking fights
with the sky.
2012
Clear Hand
Surely the fall
light sifting
through locust trees
across me
does not pray
to land here,
does not pray
to stay.
Would my eyes
and light
could land
like that,
a clear hand
sliding warm
away.
2012
The Day He Took in the Refuge Tree Thangka
“The Buddha is strong,”
declares my ten-year-old in amazement.
“He has a whole army of buddhas!”
And I take him in my arms,
my body breaking
into companies of cadence.
2012
with thanks to Samuel Rune
Consorts
I’m jealous of monks.
It’s true.
I want to be one,
but I suppose
with breasts
and one void too many
I can be only a nun.
We all can play the skull damaru.
But I want to be with you
in the monastery
where all the teachers live,
singing songs like a baritone hive,
reading ancient texts,
bumping together our bald heads.
Forget the sewing.
In the courtyard
when we debate,
point after point
I will clap my hands
like dry lightning
until we both wake up.
Ha! Ha!
I will paint thangkas,
give buddhas your blue eyes,
but don’t make me
your peripheral, cutting dakini
unless you’ll be mine.
We could take turns being the metaphor,
the center of shrines.
A necklace of heads.
2012
Desire builds a house
of me for you to live in.
Doors are everywhere.
The walls are roaring
flames sucking stale air.
You can’t enter.
I burn myself out.
You’d never know
a house was ever there.
2012
Exodus
My left eye wanders
from what my right eye dreams.
In the mirror, it is a wave
parting in the middle of my face,
my own red sea. Two peoples,
one fleeing, one in chase, both
ignorant, unseeing, make
a pilgrimage from my head
into the cleft of my cathedral
chest where everyone fingers brown
bodhi seeds. When the waters mend
their seam, no one drowns.
2012
No metaphors for
Say hello to the great shining
embroidered with your fleshy personality.
(The shining may be a clear hole, but if that scares you
think instead a rimless, bowlless, friendly bowl.)
I pull at our tight threads with poems.
Unraveling, I talk too much.
I’m paid to tell you what I know, but there are holes
in knowing funneling toward the shining hole,
and you fall through. I can’t catch you.
You can’t catch me.
We think our words are handholds,
or that our hands are words, but they are only bumps
stalling speed so fast it’s empty, so vast
even the sky falls through.
2012
Where Words Wait
When I am nearly quiet
and perfect words appear,
silence is more perfect.
I tuck the precious phrase
behind my ear like windy hair,
or gum to save for later chewing.
I promise words a quick return.
My most important work requires
such wild undoing: an empty mouth.
2012