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
What is Left
The piano (I bought
with the money left me
by my sister who left
the world eyes open
in her own guest bed
where our mother slept)
out in the abandoned
dairy barn, for which
there is no room
in this small
warm house,
and the stacks
of monochromatic
oil paintings of men’s
and women’s bodies
that were always only
ever mine, but for whom
there is a lack of walls,
will not withstand
the cracking cold,
the thaw.
2013
Metaphors
We could say the planet is a head,
Its nose the Atlantic,
The corners of its mouth
The tips of puzzled continents,
Its eyes the U.S. and Middle East,
If eyes were power,
If power were crude.
But darlings, the globe is no head.
What metaphor are we,
With 15 billion eyes and ears,
Wombs doubling life
Into gloved and unwashed hands,
Spilling what’s left
Into blind hospital buckets,
Deaf dirt floors.
What metaphor?
Perhaps instead the earth
Is a metaphor for us—
Ancient, once whole,
Always drifting,
A war of currents,
Frozen in our furthest reaches.
I would give up this globe
If I could.
When I wake up,
My eyes are no seas,
My voice is no America,
My skin is no Scotland,
My womb is no Switzerland,
My heart is no Ireland,
My hands are no Germany,
My name is no Wales.
Poems cannot hold me.
I am content to stand—
Unsure of land and words—
And walk across the room to you
Who are no Africa, no Omaha, no Mississippi,
But space wrapped in a man.
They’ll say you are a metaphor for me;
I am a metaphor for you.
2013
The Treachery of Neighbors
We watch from behind
The wire that burns.
Have worried
The proper distance
From their box in the grass,
Its swinging doors.
Sometimes the windows laugh.
The curly cow
Throws cobs we ignore,
Comes and goes;
Glances linger
Over her shoulder.
Every dawn she disappears,
A silver breath cut through pasture,
Returns with many bags.
She chews
A grassy language.
Sometimes moos.
The big bull
And their calves moo, too.
This would be confusing
But for the vacant
Stillness in their eyes.
That we recognize.
Alone, each studies us
And breathes.
They rarely stop
In twos and threes.
How eerie
We never see them eat.
2013
In morning’s hurry, I didn’t notice clouds
So grey and low, like the cloud you brought
to bed November named, weighing not
of whales or weaning calves, but two small girls,
seventeen hundred miles between and three
and a half years of no visiting while you hid
in mountains, swam in the eyes of a woman
who could not love, heavy as she was with drink.
I bring my own cloud named October, leaden
with my long-dead sister, our fatherless childhood.
I am not your child, love, but I am proof.
Of what? What grows in the empty space
left by fathers? How many times will fall
return before you climb into the arms
of my fatherborn words: You are a good man.
2013
with thanks to Rosemerry for the whales
A Lumen Who
after Wendy Videlock
This woman is a lumen who
Would seem to understand
How all at once
She’s tube of flesh,
And flux of light,
And empty plant.
2013
Yawning Towards Guernica to be Born
It so happens I’m tired
Of not being able to tell you
What I’m tired of.
Dull thirty-eight-eyed apathy,
Here’s my professional smile.
Screen-livers, blissful killers
Of HD enemies,
Laughing Picassoless packs:
Here is uncold cold,
Hot tiny haiku ices
Pricking 3-D cheeks.
Feel. You study Guernica
For the dates, perhaps
The gentleman’s C.
How boring to be tired like this.
The day the paper is due,
Half the class goes missing.
Our apathy is bigger
Than absent Mondays,
Late October fog,
Synthetic
Carpet hallways
And free popcorn.
Tired of Excel sheets
And my own signature,
I swallow complaint.
Eat paper. Gag. Pay bills.
It drives me to seek
Nothing in everything.
Some brand of happy nihilism.
Brave the hollow!
Like Neruda’s woody root
Moved through,
Words spread out, destined.
Rhyzomic, blind and empty.
We reach to mean outwardly.
But let’s say our word-carved features
Are simply furniture rearranged.
We’ll never know who is sitting
In us, for how long, or where.
But surely, the who will get tired
Of the view and move on.
2013
Salt
I cut out five
People’s hearts
To find who
I thought was me.
Salt woman, I uprooted
While the family house fell,
Yet the walls still stood.
One of the hearts
Was mine, listening.
Its right ear pressed
To the floor, the other to the sky.
The colonel couldn’t have them anymore.
When I fucked myself over,
I was my own colonel.
Now I build the house
I loved and left, over and over
In my mind. Its bathroom
Made of slate and free light.
He who loves me now,
Who heals my grief, builds it again
For my feet. I shower there.
To construct peace, to make
Love, to reconcile/ to reach
The limits of ourselves/ to let go
The means, to wake.
When I wash off the mask, the one
In which I am swimming Kate
Or Virginia heavy with rocks,
His eyes are so soft
On me I can’t blink or turn back.
The voice inside
The mask said his smile
Has baobab roots. That is when
I knew I was worth my salt.
Salt in the seams
Of my dirty laundry.
I danced it for him.
He danced his for me.
We were beautiful.
Undressed,
We washed and folded
What wasn’t us.
Tucked it into magic
Drawers. Our eyes—
Always naked,
Four open doors.
No words walk
The path between them.
How is it this space
Is the house of every god?
2013
with thanks to Julie Cummings for
helping me build an eight-room poem,
Carolyn Forché for the colonel
and Muriel Rukeyser for the fourth room