poems by rachel kellum
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Practice Dissolution
You might be afraid.
Feel your body sink and still
Into bed and yellow light.
Your arms too heavy.
Toilet too far away.
The earth of your body
Dissolves into water. You kick
The bedside toilet, swing arms at those who
Can still walk, but you are really kicking
At death. Your mother unfolds
A large absorbent pad beneath you. No one
Says diaper because they love you and your pride.
Water begins its hiss into fire, trickling from you,
Evaporating from open lips and halflit eyes.
Mother begs you, please sip. You do
Because you love her, though you have given up
The comfort of water now, your eyes dull ice.
No one sees the blue light of your water shine but you.
Sister touches your feet, sees liquid
Pool in red constellations beneath skin,
Sinking toward your body’s lowest sky.
Heat seeps past limbs, cool slides in
Like night. Mother’s painbright eyes, sisters’
Whispers begin: it is happening just as the blue book says.
You listen to all this. Your liver a bonfire
For months is finally a coal bed, glowing,
Dimming, sending out sparks, fireflies
Only you can see as breath no longer feeds its flame.
Thin wind rakes your lungs’ groping fingers, plays
The strings of your throat, your last voice.
Silence fills where breath breaks, relaxed lungs
Collapse into green light brightening as the last
Gust huffs from your mouth, eyes shoot
Open to take in the blast of light, clear white.
While your mother, sisters, husband wail
Wordlessly clutching dead hands, pressing heads
Upon your body, stroking your still warm velvet crown,
Turn from them. Countless people, life’s rich personifications
Gather in the widening now and ask your true name.
Awareness opens spherically upon itself. You answer
Without words—what you are—and begin.
2011
The butter, the cool slick
and salt of us warming
becoming more
than two in the merge
warp chest, weft breast,
thighs braided bread
baking, yeast rising
multiplying heart
in heat. We tear
crust, expose white, dip
dripping oil and herbs from
lips. We become all
this, from breath
to bread. God eats us
with our own mouths.
2009/2011
Elegy Written after a Doyra Concert in a Church
Lowing o’er the lea,
the cow did not know
her skin would dance
us in its sound.
Would my skin
could be a drum
to make your
circles move.
Such better use
than windy ash
or box of
halted flesh.
Lover, when I pass
stretch me round
a slice of hollow
tree, string my space
with silver rings,
fly your fingers’
memory, percuss,
percuss, percuss me
2011
While It Happens
Don’t think about it while it happens,
that slippery moment
buckthorn dreams your spines and deep berry eyes
while a neighbor dog barks from your chest.
Notice, don’t think, the ever twirl.
Thyme breathes your nose,
your eight palms: cupped basil leaves
out reaching each other for sun.
Comfrey knits the bells of your tongue
to sweet kneed bees.
Church bells ring your eager skin a church,
calling all in. Heavy, your peony head arches
to earth, petals wilt on your flagstone feet,
your thin neck clutches a fist of fat leftover seeds
Don’t think metaphor, personification or make believe.
Don’t think.
This isn’t the work of similes
or even cosmic permeability.
Rest. Stop swinging
the lamps of your body.
2011
Matters of Little Consequence
Today I am mostly
in the business of tending
matters of little consequence.
If I don’t eat lunch,
I’ll be empty hungry
by supper.
If I don’t write, I’ll pad
through the cool blind house,
or the red stone garden, studying
cracks and pink and green light.
If I don’t play with my boys,
they’ll find their friends and scheme
inside the giant alley lilac carved out
yesterday with dull garden shears
they lost and found at dusk. Their fort.
If I don’t help my daughter,
she will whine until sidewalk weeds
are all whacked, missing her thick book.
If we don’t talk, there will be silence.
If I don’t look at the clock,
the noon horn will still blow
a siren to the town: the day is bright!
But I will. I will eat honey toast and write,
I’ll sit near yarrow and wonder about dry roots.
I’ll laugh with my browned boys unless they cry,
and they often do. I will answer my daughter
when she calls, “Mom?” and hug her for
widening our walk just because it needed done,
even though I didn’t ask. Just once, I’ll look
at the kitchen clock. Alone, we will be
quiet, let summer work its sun
and shade across the unimportant
moonless day.
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.
From Our Basement
I couldn’t stop piling
musty pillows, broken toys,
empty cardboard boxes waiting three years
to move me out of the house
where my marriage ended.
I’m still here.
This pile for donation:
jeans outgrown by widening hips and lengthened
legs, toys for babies, colorful under dust,
the light fixture we replaced, the rack
we hung our coats upon for years.
This pile for a friend:
a bag of small clothes and little dolls,
my mother’s fine table that lost a chair
all those years ago, thrown
in anger by her second husband,
and my second husband’s grandmother’s
once pristine solid dark wood table
whose chairs cracked by
leaning back too much, surface scarred
by careless forks and wayward fire.
This pile to recycle:
the boxes, broken down flat.
This pile for the earth:
anything peed upon by proud cats
or sleeping toddlers, moldy rugs and concrete dust
destroyed by basement water, clothes broken open
by busy knees, toys by small boys’ hands, and
tiny plastic parts that lost their large plastic families.
I’m done collecting junk,
holding onto dust.
I returned it to itself.
You know how it goes,
the saying.
My daughter and I hauled pile four
in three
truckloads to the landfill where
expressionless glancing men shoveled
rancid trash onto a stained conveyor belt.
Two times in the white truck we backed in
and tossed our junk on the rank concrete.
Throw it away, most of us say.
You may have heard there is no away,
and they, of course, are right,
but that the earth
would open its mouth
and swallow
what is broken, useless and stinking in my life
healed me, even as I cringed
at my own shameful waste.
I half expected the attendant to shake her head, click
her tongue, but this is Morgan County, and I’m Green.
No one cared but me. They took my money. Six bucks
a load to unload more than they could ever bury.
The third load skipped the conveyor
and went straight to the earth:
the peeling old front door (what did we save it for?)
the bent aluminum swing set
the futon we made love on,
that our kids
napped and peed on in trusted, diaperless sleep,
that I leaned upon to push our second son
in a great thrust of inner wind
into a dry world from inside
my wet and bleeding one,
that held you in the basement
when we began to separate
That futon was so bright there at the foot
of the pile, the most beautiful of trash,
hunched over in accidental sorrow
like the woman I saw thrown from her car,
breast hanging out the bottom of her disheveled shirt,
unmoving. I prayed someone would come
rescue her because I couldn’t stop,
already late for the airport.
She was dead on arrival.
Nobody saved her.
Now, at the landfill, I hoped
the men to our left tossing
roof shingles one by one by hand
from a low trailer would see the futon
in its red, black and tan
southwest glory
and save it, take it home,
kiss their wives upon it.
They were too busy.
I watched it, a bright memory
folded in on itself in the rearview mirror
and drove over the scale
lighter, on time.
2011
Graduation Day
for Jose, whose afro could never be contained by such a small cap
The wind
doesn’t care
about graduation
or ceremony.
It celebrates beginnings
by ripping music
off stands,
flipping modest women’s
flowery skirts,
lock by lock freeing
hair from clips and careful
spray, throwing
mortarboards
upon the earth.
Go ahead, pray—
but it is wind
that blows our kids
into the world.
2011