poems by rachel kellum
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When a love can find no ground
When a love can find no ground
it sends pale roots through empty spaces:
arid dusty closets, musty basement trunks,
between forgotten hardback books,
looking for water. You feed it spit
and tears, visit its translucent limbs alone,
refuse to prune, watch it wither finely
into spindly filigree, lovely for wanting
to live and dying so quietly.
2008
Small Town Wrestling Sestina
It’s hard to write a poem in a room
full of small sweaty boys and the smell
of bleach. Parents line the walls on mats
like lazy Buddhas with bad backs.
Boys wear spandex short-legged jumpsuits, tight
and low cut across flat chests.
And my son, age eight, wiry heavy weight, wore on his chest
between nipples a temporary Tinker Bell tattoo, tight
when he stretched, wrinkled as he crawled across mats.
A muscled father, upon seeing it, patted his back
and said, Cover that up. So he did. I can smell
the homophobic sweat of men across the room.
In this small Republican town, there isn’t much room
to be wide. We live inside windows too close, tight-
lipped in suffering, good neighbors. We back
each other up. The thin man against the wall three mats
down removed my gall bladder last year, saw my tattooed chest,
breasts sagging sideways above inflated belly, smelled
the air escape my hissing body, not to mention the smelly
little polyped pouch that housed my bile. His and my chest
heave with pride while our sons collide in tights,
practice domination on maroon wrinkled mats.
We yell with shaking limbs across the room,
Throw a half nelson! Keep him on his back,
Son! And the weekends accelerate back to back.
I miss his second meet, stuck in a conference room
in Denver. Almost home, driving down our street, I see the medal on his chest,
dull faux gold, second place, he smiles through crooked teeth. He smells
clean, says he was beat by a boy from Sterling 5 to 3. Slamming fists on the mat,
I learn later over beer, our son wrestled through his furious tears. My throat tight
to hear the way he growled, scowled and fought to breathe through tight
angry lungs, hyperventilating, flung the undefeated boy across relentless mats,
spun away and sobbed without shame, fiercely wriggling off his back,
one of two kids never to be pinned by this lonely champion black-chested
kid wrestling through a sea of white skin. So small across the room,
the referee raised his thin arm high, armpit wearing the smell
of victory. On the edge of the mat, back against his father’s chest,
finally finding his breath, our tight-limbed smelly boy made himself room.
2008
Never let him build
a house of you, my dear.
He would steep in you, forever
train you dark and bitter (See
the stain ring!) unless you pull
the string, wring him out from time
to time, and point toward the sea.
Remind him you are no house,
no fragile cup, but rain soaking
needles, the mother of cones
spreading seeds, a lover of heat,
waiting for fire to scorch
and breed what you drop.
You are the work of green.
In the beginning
If
for whatever reason
when I grew from colliding invisible cells
one a drifting still cocoon
one a swimming moon with tail
both composed of hugging
trembling molecules
and
smaller still
atoms
charged planets chasing each other
in vast microscopic space
around endless little suns
little suns just more empty space
glowing inside with quarks
self existing lights in space reaching
for other lights
colliding
dividing
multiplying
always beginning and dying
then I am satisfied it all begins
like this
for whatever reason
though I like to think it is love.
2010
three degrees below freezing: if there is light enough to see
It is cold. People are careful,
wear more clothes than are comfortable.
We wrap arms around ourselves
and lean into the warmest places
we find, and in these places
still find cold around edges,
seeping through seams,
or deep in the core of things
we thought would always burn.
We lean for a long time and wait
for heat to build on heat.
It usually does.
We want to think we are earths
crusted around molten cores
of roiling light. But that light is dark
inside. And though we say it is, it isn’t light,
it’s heat we seek in times like these.
We trust the deep fire of the body,
of each others’ bodies, to deliver, and
hope the heat is light. In heat lives the body,
in the body: light the eye can’t see
until we break open and what’s inside seeps
slow amber glowing. Here, I have broken,
come warm your hands, read by me.
2007
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
two trees
I can feel the immortality of my grandmother’s crust
in the dough ball itself, marbled with shortening, the secret
of flakes and high cholesterol. I split this weighty atom
in two, the first duality in the universe of pie: top and bottom,
wrapped in plastic, waiting in dark refrigerator to be rolled
from sphere to plane over mist of flour, then unrolled
over glass dish, rough edges jagged lace around the brim,
a waiting bed for cinnamon sugared apple wedges
skinned by a man who, after years drifting in timeless bliss,
stopped to hear I wish to eat from the tree of knowledge
and leave this. But still I stay, and homeless Buddhists,
we make pie on Christmas. Green waxy apples abundant,
a tart and hearty mound rising above the rim, waiting
for pastry lid to unfurl like warm blankets over cold
kids smiling at mother, tucking them in. Rolling
and pinching the up and down fringe of doughy discs
into rope of thick crust, thumbs echoing Granny’s, just so,
making rippled ridge, a circular bridge to eternity.
I sip an ale and grin, my austere Lutheran grandmother never did,
and so the famous crust has changed in one detail: intoxication.
And another: a wind of Hindu mantras makes my heart
a sail, makes me slice with paring knife a Vedic vent.
Ancient om, so like a number 30 cradling one-eyed
crescent grin, a personal promise: 30 is when life begins,
when lines of sunshine smiling finally live, permanently,
in skin around my eyes, and Granny’s pie the key
to eternal life. From the belly of the oven pie is born.
I carefully pierce perfection with four lines, turn
the crusty wheel like prayer, offer Adam, weary with patience,
a steaming slice of the tree of life topped with mounds
of melted vanilla ice cream. “Well done,” he says,
“Well done,” with soft eyes. And we nod yes.
2008
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.