poems by rachel kellum
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Western Horizon
Beyond this kitchen window—you,
prairie horizon, palest blue lifted over
bleached yellow, choked to white winter,
some wrecked fence a black sentence
poorly punctuating half the distance,
like last year’s poorly executed painting
done with a knife, an abstract prophecy
of my new townless home.
Old thoughts leach through
January’s cold pane to you.
I cannot choose a favorite light.
Daybreak buttering your dark toast.
White noon eating you for lunch.
The bold day spilling her bourbon on your lap.
A family of moons crawling over you.
Light takes you on your own terms, turning.
Like you, I turn toward, into, away from it.
Your distant non-line, a silent line.
The north wind carries a message to us both.
But you have nothing to say
on the occasional truck’s parallel groan,
the drips dishes drop,
the refrigerator’s rolling hum.
So, I talk to myself.
Where do you begin as I move toward you?
Do you count cows too?
How small am I from there?
Whom do you prefer?
Wyoming tumbleweed?
Goldfinch gleaning twisted thistle bones?
Me, a gaze above the sink?
Erased.
A blip cleaned out.
A washed dream.
How small am I from there?
How small am I from there?
How small am I from there?
2014
Raising Wind Horse
On the best days,
Nothing trips
Wires taking pictures
Of us. Muybridge
Has no bet to settle
With love, no witnesses, no politicians.
On the next best days,
Poems are cameras
Proving there are times
Indeed we love all four feet
Off the ground.
We celebrate the forgotten rider.
2014
Mistaken Metaphors at Close Range
Some ancestor of the pyramids
Landed on Plymouth Rock
And started making bricks
To throw from a ladder
In the wide bearded sky,
Mistaking metaphor, boarding doors.
Fast forward: pawns knee deep
In ocean foam wring their velvet
Coats upon the shore. Kites grieve.
Revolver barrels gleam, growing
Boys evolve machine gun clarity
On screens. Televisions drown.
This is our Eight of Swords warning.
Beg your daughters, teach your sons:
Scribble golden pentacles on your arms!
2013
in response to Mark Kreger’s art exhibit, At Close Range
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