poems by rachel kellum
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This may not be true
This may not be true.
My father doesn’t remember exactly,
But says he may, he just may.
I was in a dress just above my knees.
I want it to be white with red trim,
Prim, crisp cotton. And my hair just so,
Large curls reaching up, and my lips too.
He carried me on his hip, I would say.
Sat me in place on the bench beside him,
Or on his lap, I was so small, looking up and out.
Fronts of warm wind reached from him,
And he smelled warm, like breath
And spiced sweat,
Like a summertime hug, his smile close to mine.
They pulled the bar tight across our legs.
The light made him squint and search the sky.
So I looked too.
And the wheel began to turn. Up we went,
Round and round. So high into the air until
We could only go down. There were probably
Clouds, or not clouds, and everything was blue and sun,
Everything was two smiles, two hands clasped,
Mine a bird in the high up nest of his.
Maybe I was two.
A few years later he left my mother and us for another
(Though he would disagree, say he did not cheat,
It has always been the family mystery.)—
Toothy Wilma with boys who chased to kiss us—
And it didn’t last.
And he was lonely and cried, he tells me now.
Rode his Kawasaki with the wind, and tried to keep
Numb watching the Gong Show or Three’s Company,
Or CHiPs, in an apartment whose red curtains
Made everything red, even my naps next to him,
Whispering I wish we lived together, and he said,
Sometimes things can’t be what we want,
And I cried in the heat of that sorry truth.
And he held me till I slept.
And I cried with my mother too, on her lap,
In the corner of a dark dining room, on the extra chair,
When he didn’t call but every few months
And holiday visits were not enough, and the years spun
Blame. I made him pay.
I wrote the kind of letter only a twenty three year old
With some psychology in her pen could write.
He was surely the archetype of my distant boyfriends,
Too old, too wounded, or too far away.
And now, a gardener instead of a student, I could say
He’s the soil of my two failed marriages, my heart
Too lonely or wild a weed to be pruned and tamed,
But wanting to be, just the same.
And now, I see how he could leave, how he could trust
The wheel, how he could love me, and leave me,
And return, and be
Far away and as close as my own breathing.
As unfaithfully faithful to himself as I have ever been.
I have given up believing in him, or me, the free.
And I’ll never know if any of this is true.
But what is true is that I want it to be,
And that we have always been turning
On a wheel into sky above things,
Far from where people on the ground
Can see what we see, and then falling,
An arc of falling over the edge into nothing
Toward earth, never hitting, just— look! –lifting,
Moving blind backwards so we can move forward, up,
Past the red of what we feel, even when we aren’t strong.
It isn’t us, just the hub doing what it does, reeling
Us along into the song of the ferris wheel.
2009/2014
Black Rosehips
Rosehips shriveled black,
unpruned by the year’s white shears,
will not flavor tea.
2011, 2014
It starts as soft breath
It starts as soft breath—
stillness stirred beyond itself to move—
combs grasses back
like the gentlest mother’s brush.
It then begins to hurry, fret,
rocking cars like restless babes,
leans against trees
like the deepest mother fatigue.
Nothing firmly rooted moves.
Boughs break and fall
clinging to new nests.
Birds mourn.
A roar
groans like birth.
Mother funnel delivers dark dust,
rotted cottonwoods,
rusty cadillacs, family photos,
white cribs, pink bathtubs,
precious darlings
into the trembling hands
of a yellow green sky
that cannot hold them
long enough to cry.
2014
Marginalia
You, the even pages,
I, the odds.
All our words
And margins touch
In sleep.
Come dawn,
We shuffle air,
Spread wide
The spine,
Gutter to the sky.
2014
Vampire
A self loathing bed.
The door in the other room closed.
A knack, a loaded weapon
In hand, formidable.
For crissake, post-sex bolt out the door.
Prize getting naked regret.
The expression contradicts a room
For doubt.
“Sex,” under breath. “Over it.”
Stung and grateful for frustration.
Needed.
She couldn’t remember sated.
Vibrated senses.
Higher frequency too tight for her body.
Tangle still-ripe.
Bite drawn blood.
The strange tongue enigmatic.
The fleeting sense ought to be appalled.
Horrified.
But she lay dark, twisted.
Craved.
2014
A found-poem from Lara Adrian’s
novel, Taken by Midnight, p. 174
Embarkation
One year, in the dark, a man thanked a woman for a night. Earlier, below a glowing orange window he had called her over to his side of the table to share, when he reached for the shred of carrot on her blouse, when his eyes shone with father grief, when he nodded to her awful confessions and, later, didn’t order tea, she felt the swell, the choice arise. She chose. An ancient song slipped their bodies over its head like skin, or ocean foam, a low crescendo. It was a song of saving, the body of a major third. Can two people save each other from the ravages of selfhood? Escape? Who carries whom in love’s concert? The song offered itself. A possible ship, an embarkation.
2014
Volunteers
Light revolves us; we have circled
Hidden suns circling a larger one
Back to this beginning place.
Can it already be our first day?
For you, I pulled back thick curtains
On shame-lights making lace of me.
In my lonely white-rooted darkness,
You touched the lace and dreamed.
Limping, porous too, you packed that house.
We buried labeled boxes in the earth.
Homeless, we became a little mountain,
A long drive, fire and water, couriers.
Now a wide plain, we meadowlark the sky.
My old perennials root some other lawn:
That once-bed of my children’s paradise,
That hard packed marriage and divorce,
Sweet garden of my lonely manhood! Once a girl,
Rilke knew that sky-wrought solitude,
The oneness of austere androgyny. I cried too.
But from him I depart that mystic heroism.
I am no manly woman, you, no woman-man
Nor Rilke’s mirror, but tilled space, broken large.
Here shines not the dupe but multiplicity of our hearts,
Cast in cosmic arcs, sour manure where we grow.
My love, this has been a year of sprouting up.
Our new bed resolves the soil. Love springs
Through what wilted yellow-dry, now mulch.
Some volunteers we keep, some, plough.
The old barn fell for light to fall again on ground.
Forgotten beds untilled for years: they give.
The earth slow turns, and we are turning earth.
Seeds in hand, the garden waits, roughed in.
2014
To Unbloom
Lute-sown
Seed too deep to root
Too raw
To be exhumed
Waits for promise
To unbloom
While overhead
A garden swoons.
2014
Man in the Moon
The full moon
Doesn’t ponder
Unpaid bills.
It is no silver dollar,
heavy breast or milk.
Its halo is no silver ring.
Likewise, it is no tumor,
empty pocket,
Zeus’ oculus.
No wish fulfilling jewel,
It doesn’t shrink in poverty
Or play the lottery.
We do.
2014