poems by rachel kellum
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The Bardo of the Sea
I’ve been knee deep
In the sea from the moment
I gave up duality.
TVs don’t reach me.
My red boat is always just
Within reach.
Darling, I bring you
A white package.
It is empty.
When you unwrap
The bow, it will be like pouring
Water into water.
We fill it with flaming
Tumbleweeds, open-eyed kisses,
Our own make-believe distance.
Oh, knee deep blisses!
Deep ignorances!
Let’s dive.
2013
in response to Mark Kreger’s painting, The Crossing
Black Place II
Black-PlaceII, 1945, Georgia O'Keeffe
O’Keeffe’s dark lipped plans
Weren’t pink gummed with ghostly teeth—
but slant lit badlands.
2013
The first poet laureate
ripped off limbs of the woman tree
wrapped them into a woman ring
left her maid in a wooden breeze
and crowned himself the poet’s king.
2012
with thanks to David Mason for telling the story
Gossip: Another Way to Sky
Another Way to Sky, oil on canvas, 36''x36'', Rachel Kellum
If you live free, know this:
your life is the jailor’s grist
served in hot whispers
to prisoners she keeps and is.
When she offers you
a plate, don’t eat.
Despite her smile,
it is full of spit.
Fly on the outside,
on the cloud’s upside.
Grin. Write it:
I’ve nothing to hide.
2011
when you pass through me
as a flock of ones and zeros
the ones become your fingers
your black eyelashes the Ls
in your night strummed lullaby
the zeros our morning mouths
when you pass through me
pixilated blue eyed glint
your digital dimple touches
my screen lips and my heart
skips a rope of ones and zeros
when you pass through me
your name a blinking bouquet
of ones and zeros my right knee
buckles to kneel to ask deep space
to marry me always it says yes
2011
Watching Swimming Pool
Charlotte Rampling, once ravishing boyish bombshell, playing
Sarah Morton, crime detective novelist, nearly sixty.
A young writer shakes her hand with a cocky smirk,
“My mother loves your work.” His grin says it all. She seethes.
Her English publisher waning lover sends her to his French home to write.
His blond nubile daughter arrives unexpectedly.
Sarah watches, we watch, the girl bare breasted with still, hooded gaze
at the pool, or eating cereal, or writing in a journal, everything topless,
breasts bobbing over the mundane moments of living.
What she does when no one is watching. But the girl moves
as though she is being watched, as we learn to do, moving for men.
Later, Sarah listens, we listen, to the girl moaning with oafish older men.
Cut to bedroom: we watch her, not him, and she knows we are watching.
Charlotte plays reserved Sarah, but Charlotte has had her share of sex on film.
We know she knows this writhing for the best theatrical angle, yet, still,
Sarah reaches for earplugs. We see men notice her despite the girl, despite her years.
French cinema, you know. Tres complex.
We notice her. How can we not. She is Charlotte Rampling. Lying near the pool,
the camera pans her rigid angled length the way it panned the curvy smooth girl earlier.
We see Sarah’s veined sinewy feet, the boyish thin hips, the breasts flattened by gravity
in a modest swimming suit. Perhaps we are meant to be saddened by this juxtaposition,
the way age dries and robs the most beautiful women of water and luster. She steals it back
by writing, stiff faced, a rough wall, eyelids crumbling. The publisher avoids her calls.
These are the kept scenes, the ones we see, expect to see: an older woman,
leatherly, alone, stuck in her wordy mind robbing the lives of the young,
unable to land Franck, the interested sexy waiter, before he is killed by the girl.
She even helps the girl bury him. Oh, how we had hoped victory for her!
Let the old woman have the young man for once! We know what gives us worth.
We are surprised when she bares her old and surprisingly lovely breasts on the balcony
to the murder-suspecting gardener. As a ruse, a distraction, she seduces him:
short, unshaven, white whiskered, pear bellied, sweaty old man, to save
the young girl’s neck. She writes the girl’s story, becomes like a mother to her,
of course, and publishes the book behind her publisher lover’s back.
She has won, but it is the winning of a jealous crone getting back her own.
This is when she finally, truly smiles. The end.
But you know how DVD’s are. There is always more. What was cut. Click it.
Sarah wandering the French village alone, lean, self-contained, ordering at the café,
served by the sexy French Franck she barely notices. Clicking down stone streets
on stick legs in loose beige slacks, peering into dark rubbled windows,
touching rough walls of the fallen castle of de Sade, stiff limbed, tall,
upright, heavy lidded, self-bridled, always almost grinning. She is Sarah Morton,
writer, yet she is Charlotte. We know she is both, though it is cold
how she moves, selecting round fruits in the market and tubs of yogurt,
cool foods that need no cooking. And wine. So quiet. Days without words.
She eagerly plops perpendicular into a green slatted patio chair at a green slatted table,
straight backed, to type. Her mouth moves with her fluttering fingers. Later, cigarette
hanging from lips, curled into a cushioned, high backed, wooden legged chair,
scribbling quickly on typed manuscripts, revising. Her face registering peace,
sometimes laughter, tickled, obviously, with her own genius.
When the publisher asks on the phone what she is writing, she won’t say.
Alone, she belongs only to herself, breast-stroking
across the empty pool wearing a floppy hat, dry faced, slightly smiling.
Still the camera pans, but in these scenes, the gardener is not watching.
Neither is the sexy waiter or publisher. Only we are. We can see
Charlotte is happy being watched as Sarah not being watched. She moves that way,
in awkward womanly angles, the aesthetic of utility, moving from here to there.
And I am happy watching her unwatched and happy: the deleted scenes,
the ones that make us not-women in the world, objects only to ourselves,
the ones the director knows are lovely on a screen, but won’t sell.
2009/2011
Three and Sixty-Six Years Ago: A Lost Coin
She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.’
In a darkening corner of the garden not turned
Or planted since the summer he tilled
By hand his own packed hurt, pausing to stare
After my leaving for another weekend—
I could not not go, I’m sorry, all, to admit,
To disillusion those who wished I were more,
We all were more than clods crumbling apart
Riddled with small roots waiting to dart—
I found a small silver coin.
I rubbed it,
Obviously not an ordinary dime. So thin,
What a strange head! Hurried to transplant
The Roma tomatoes before nightfall and
Mosquitos, I pocketed it.
Next morning,
Dressed to plant peppers in last night’s jeans
I remembered. There, so tiny: 1945,
And a head with wings!
The back: a bundle, an axe and olive branch.
Misnamed a Mercury dime by Moderns
Who of course loved the god
Of tricky messages, but no,
It was meant to be Winged Liberty,
A free thinker,
And it was no man,
But a woman, Elsie Kachel Stevens,
Wife of Wallace, beloved Modern
Poet.
At once I wondered
Is she the woman
By the sea who sang
The world into order? Who wondered
About paradise in her peignoir
Eating orange slices
Near the green cockatoo?
I could see her
Sitting very still
For Adolf, the sculptor in their building
Who noticed her
Cheekbones and winged hair,
Searching her lines for the portrait bust—
A model for the coin— with careful hands
In clay and perhaps upon her own neck and face
Making material match material.
I understand how worlds are made.
Adolf gave her the bust.
After her husband’s death,
She tried to let it go.
Her daughter refused to take it
For her mother seemed so fond of it.
No one knows where it is now.
Pawnshop? Attic?
Bottom of the Hudson River
Where she once stood pondering
Him and a blue heron flew?
It is lost,
But her winged head
Was in my garden, thin soft silver
Gashed twice by my own hungry shovel.
Tomatoes send quiet roots
Into soil that once held her.
The new garden holds me, alone,
Sitting quietly in the morning,
Eyes woven green with gentle windy leaves.
Overhead, on a wire, a pigeon sings.