poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
The Machinery of Desire
1
Everything is calling, clicking
an intricate clockwork of longing.
Crickets rub their toothy wings,
cars race hungrily along black ribbons,
airy arms tingle for breakfast,
pigeons ever gurgle on the wire,
dogs whine to be let in—pity them,
and me, I chase my stories round
my head looking for the end.
2
My words are never content with silence,
that great engine turning poems.
And why not? Silence has everything to say,
everywhere to go. Words are its wings
rubbing together, singing come here, love me,
leave me alone, no—stay, yes—go, listen, don’t
look too hard for me. I’m under the pile
of dirty jeans, I’m tucked in the crotch
of the mulberry tree, I’m up here
in the mouth of the great horned owl, waiting.
2011
The Toy
The boy holds up the toy he built
of colored slotted discs
from a Taco Bell kid’s meal
and explains softly to his mother:
His neck is made of earth.
His chest is air.
His arms and belly are also earth.
His spear is a shaft of air tipped with fire.
What is this?
The pelvis, his mother says.
His pelvis is water.
His thighs are air.
His calves are also water.
His feet are fire.
His head is a shield.
I like him, he concludes.
He’s the Friendly Earth Guardian.
The boy has built himself.
She turns the toy over in her hands,
his elements rushing through,
and recognizes the man.
2011
Rant of the 21st Century Blog Poet
Forgive me for not wanting to be more
properly, postmodernly, publishably
obscure, but, enough already,
proud, paper poets, clutching your journals
and precious books, peddling bitter art syrup
and sorrow for next to nothing! for tree killers!
Words are free!
Forgive me, I am weak. Living is maze and flame
enough without our random word strings. Yes,
there is chaos. There are black holes
in train station eyes. Even mine.
But there is also pattern and, unfortunately, rhyme.
Go ahead, call me trite, or better yet: Poetaster.
The art of posing isn’t hard to master.
How do I want to see?
I want to glue all the broken cups
together and offer them,
leaking, to you. Drink!
Take it from a bumper sticker:
Don’t believe everything you think.
This place is not so fractured
as our blinking rootless lines.
We all hold our own things
in a certain fractal order. Just because
our order shrinks doesn’t mean
expansion doesn’t sing!
And I’m going to say it: I can’t pretend
postmodern poetry doesn’t stink,
even if we like to sniff our own reeking pits!
It’s ok to get clean once in a while, kids,
wash off the crowded street.
Say something sweet, for gods’ sake,
for Nietzsche’s! Do you really want
only pale academe to read you, Übermenschen?
Pile you dusty on their shelves next to Keats?
Bright stars, admit it! That is our wet dream.
But let’s get with it, Marxist wannabes:
words aren’t some commodity!
Anyway, they pay us beans.
Whose whore are we?
Haven’t you noticed? Words are finally free!
(for a modest monthly wireless fee, of course,
or a quick trip to the library.)
Even if no one remembers me
after the Mother of All Solar Flare Catastrophes
licks my words right off this screen,
that’s fine. I’ll either be dead, or still writing.
Maybe then I’ll more readily seek
your perfect bound postmodern ranks.
Like Stanley and Blanche, we could bury
the hatchet and make it a loving cup.
At least until the network
is back up.
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
Mourning Mojo
This morning I was going to paint
a red and yellow mindscape
but wake to a puppy’s hungry yips
and my old black dog on three legs
licking death’s huge ear. I hunch
to become her fourth leg and limp alongside.
My mind travels over her silken spine,
recently narrowed slow hips, deep
into unfathomable canine bones,
seeking some light or dark thing
over which to rest or wring my hands.
First she lies in the shallow hole she dug,
always digs, in the flower bed between violets
and lavender in early summer, serious
with dignity, facing foundation wall,
averting her gaze. The lanky puppy sniffs
the patient face he normally playfully nips.
Wondering what he knows, I know.
Next, she is missing. Not behind the woodbox
or lilacs. I wonder did she translate to light.
I peer down the flight of basement stairs,
enter the unlikely place. There, she fills
the farthest shadow, a leaning sphinx
looking at the crumbling wall. I crawl to her,
join my dark to hers, wait in her wet fur.
13 July 2011
strange garments
I was naked in sorrow.
You clothed me in vines
of honeysuckle. I fed
sweet orange trumpets
your name
with my own winter whisper
my most tenacious light.
The horns are wilting!
Evergreen clings
to my thin voice.
I rip root fingers
from my lips and throat.
Again I am naked.
I stand here
clutching stunning vines
while sorrow buds
a thousand ears
a thousand eyes.
2011
If you want silence
don’t seek a quiet place.
Let trains rattle and call
dogs howl
the freeway hum the rain
fall
in ticks
and taps
the movie mumble
through your
bedroom floor.
It is not necessary
to close
your doors.
Just listen to the lacy din
or each sound
in turn
the way you’d notice
a cloud or bird
drifting,
then shift
to the blue behind.
Fall in.
Silence lives in the shape
around sound.
2011
off the grid
the only woman on earth
who to my face
in pencil
told me
you are a bad mother
met me in an unlikely place
with her husband
who has dedicated himself
to creating the life
for his family
I always wanted
to create
for
myself
and mine
off the grid
we all looked out
at the ocean
stood on a bridge
next to their red
biodiesel jeep
she didn’t apologize
but hugged me
asking
if I could care for
two of her five
children
while they
went on a date
she in her red mini skirt
having lost her mother’s belly
he uncharacteristically
buttoned up
crisp and clean
I did
the youngest escaped
while I gassed up
I caught her just before
the street
buckled her in twice
the oldest boy smiled
we headed down streets
too steep for life
the brakes were gone
not accelerating
not stopping either
I jumped the jeep
wrapped my huge arms
around it, held us
back
from tragedy
with my feet
it was all just a dream
except for the leaden
pronouncement
and my solar wind
powered longing
she still hates me
for the life I live
regardless
of fantastic feet
and a bridge
wielded by my psyche
to this woman in the waking
who is walking my dream
2011
prayer of the petunia
please,
wise
fingers,
pinch
off
the
brittle
bloom
where
my
new
bud
waits.
there
is
more
sweet
scent
to
give
you,
live
you.
2011