poems by rachel kellum
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What We Would Do
If the day’s promise were you cannot fail,
I would spend the day with you, son.
If you looked thin, I would prepare
A square meal without nagging you
To better consider your health.
You would not roll your eyes or lift your palms
In defense. You would eat. Everything.
Smiling, thanking me for loving you
With homegrown food. We would howl
At raunchy stand-up comedy, youtube hoot,
Make up our own horrible jokes
About dead babies. I wouldn’t scold you.
If we disagreed, you wouldn’t leave me
In the car, idling. I wouldn’t chase you
Down the dark street, beg you
To get in, come home, sleep where I know
You are safe. On a perfect day, you’d respond
To my texts, or call before bed,
And I wouldn’t think of cancelling your phone.
You would say, “Mom, I don’t blame you for life
Being hard or unfair.” I would say,
“It is only unfair if you imagine it
Some other way,” and you wouldn’t say,
“Stop being so philosophical.
Men don’t talk like that.” And I would say,
“Ok. Teach me how to talk
Like a mother to a man.”
And you would. And I would.
2015
Happy National Poetry Month!
In celebration of April's new weeds, poetry and my landing on planet earth 44 years ago, I'll try my darnedest to write a poem a day in cahoots with other NaPoWriMo dreamers. Please join us in the poem-a-day challenge by signing up here:
What We Could Not Let Go Of
It is the time my father’s voice
Begins to slur; my mother’s back and blood
Cannot move her, move slowly enough through her,
Without a knife, a pill, a corpse’s generous bone.
Death is not her friend but his, with its habit
Of gifting what is left of close and distant
Relatives. He never wastes a breath
On Death’s ill-timed greed.
He asked my sister Becca
For her new red Ford to give his favorite son.
She must have boiled to save it for her husband.
Thwarted even so, Death is not my father’s foe.
How else would he have made a life
Pulling the maimed from cars
Crushed by speed, houses charred
By pretty lights? It is all matter of fact.
My mother, though, is still a glass
Full of her daughter’s final glassy stare.
Every night she shatters sleep
With too long prayer and careful notes
On kitchen counters to be read
By the living and the dead in looping script.
Rebecca, I love you! last night’s note said.
Having just arrived alive by plane, I wasn’t jealous.
My own young sons already walk the house, divvy up
Their father’s guns, guitars, his father’s army
Knives. “Vultures,” he laughs. Perhaps.
Their urge is just as natural as burial in the sky.
The birds fly off with eyes and arms.
Our things, our larger bodies,
Feed our young what we once loved,
What we could not let go of.
24 March 2015
Until Something Escapes
The state hammers
You into palatable cliché,
A human gauge.
Oddness warps sharp angles
Inward like godless prayer,
A crushed cage.
2015
Pilgrimage
Each distant comfort
Of the rooster crow—
Moonlight, midday, morning—
Your earth face
Is the sun I turn toward.
I cannot stop
This dayless revolution,
Wake against
Your lips’ soft sculpture.
Mandorla gaze—
Two gentle slopes
Of slow lashed lids
Unveil you.
Trusting child,
Stock-still—
More man than sight
Can take.
My breath unfolds
Its crumpled paper.
Blood writes your name
In simple script.
My hands speak
Their silent words
Upon your crown,
Your cheek, your neck,
The silken dunes
Work and wind
Have carved of you.
These shoulders. This back.
Warm chest blown
To belly, thighs
And ancient feet—
I need no map.
I am your hungry pilgrim.
2015
Nests
But for my love and a fat Siamese
My house is usually empty.
But it is Friday. My turn.
Two sons in tow, we play at random words.
Virgin Mary! Revolutionary War!
Elephant dung! Apocalypse! Ear of corn!
Sam, 12, stops, exclaims, What is that? The sun?
And then we know. The moon! Ah, the moon.
His small voice says, It is a golden dome.
A white car holds us.
We hold the moon like a flat stone
To skip across
The prairie. Let’s keep playing, he says.
Grey, 15, begins: Monkey scrotum! Rooster comb!
Dental floss! Alien anal probe!
Once home and helloed, Sam builds
A fire surrounded by concrete blocks.
He feeds it hunks of scrap lumber
And wind-bleached tumbleweeds.
Eventually Grey is cold in thin clothes
And, having laughed enough with me, goes.
Sam tells me of the comet in Orion’s belt
Hidden in high clouds.
We walk to the side of the house.
Night has finally laid her white egg.
My boy whispers in a voice
That soon will not be a boy’s, It is so mysterious.
And it is: how quietly a nest can fill,
How quickly we can find
Ourselves alone in it.
2015
31 days of almost 4:00 a.m.
How can one make January wrong
Or night? The night
Holding the deadly car
In the selfsame palm
As the innocent star of a man.
Or boiling up a sleepless winter plan
To ruin a good son’s life.
The horror too sublime to pen
I’ve lain in ink the sky
Sobbed into the farthest stars
And not tried to move them.
2015
Perfect Birthday
Late April sings my birth in a robin’s throat.
Cheery up, cheery oh!
If I am lucky, and I am, it is Sunday morning.
Always, he’s the warm seam along my southern edge.
We wake and doze, dream and wake,
Gaze, blink and other morning things. Our eyes
Sparkle like coffee, like every other minute
Poured by dawn between us
But drawn out slow like gravity’s honey.
We pad around the kitchen. Children rise.
Each hides a poem
Behind a back, waiting for the moment
To show me what new words have come from ones
Who slid from me three perfect songs
I could never write. I sway and hum along.
2015
Given
Given Walden,
I meant to be alone
From age 15.
I didn’t know Thoreau
Burned down a wood
And loved fine Lydian,
Ralph Waldo’s wife,
And walked with her
In his two years
From time to time.
Given weeks alone
At 43, words do not come.
I drive my skin
To work on winter
Break, type
Dates on a form
And see your face
Before I drift,
Swerve to write
A poem.
2015