poems by rachel kellum
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October Elegy
For my student, Nate Osburn
When fall fell, so did you.
We were not ready for the drop,
The sudden parallel.
The leaves of all your papers, crisp,
Cling still to autumn limbs
Like dreams of your green mind.
Yellow-tinged I gather them
From deep inside the screens.
From wind and loss,
Rake gorgeous piles of words
That were and weren’t you,
But, ever after, worlds.
Your pages now the only places
Left to pause and play
In thought with you—
Brave you who flat refused
Personified paradox,
You for whom the human mind
Was always god enough
Yet never god.
And wasn’t yours a brilliant,
Kindly, honest one.
2015
Annual Work Plan
The year is not a hill.
Push the annual work plan
Aside. Due Friday.
Fill in blanks of travel forms.
Attach receipts with paper clips.
Think meals in terms of per diem.
Not sushi, sake, miso, friends.
Forget the empty gestures
Of distant conferences.
Count miles. Cash in.
Circle words and numbers
On sixteen rubrics.
Learning must be proven
To students
And bottom-line feeders
For whom it is not enough
To assess light in one’s own
Or others’ eyes.
Out here in the dark,
Everything measured,
Ferried for a price.
Your ____________.
Fill in the blank.
Scribble conversations
In margins and hope
Against arms.
Time ticks. More work.
More work. More work.
The to-do list self-goading.
The state mule self-loading.
Note how time erodes.
Note how quickly, how often
It rings: the digital singing bowl
Of Thich Nhat Hahn.
The app you, overloaded,
Downloaded for fun, for free,
A precious boat,
Set to chime about every hour
(Programmed unpredictability)
To wake you out of mire.
When it sounds you pause
One moment to own
Your skin, your silence,
Vast mother holding the stream
Of your moving mind hands.
One second, maybe two,
You close your eyes.
No desk, no screen,
No mechanical pencil.
No end to desk, to screen,
To mechanical pencil.
Ease back in. Submerge.
Open-eyed. Swim.
Breathe beneath surfaces.
Newly gilled. Remember.
Work inside you
Without space is a stone.
2015
You're/I'm
You’re parakeet.
I’m hummingbird.
This means nothing to nectar.
I’m milk thistle.
You’re tomato bloom.
Let’s build boxes for bees.
You’re cast iron.
I’m stainless steel.
Who knew the earth could cook?
I’m Russian olive.
You’re cottonwood.
Don’t believe in trash trees.
You’re snare crescendo.
I’m cello smoke.
Song is sung by silence.
I’m camera.
You’re handheld mirror.
Bedtime burns our selfies.
You’re lost button.
I’m tarnished dime.
Whose deep pocket is this?
2015
A Safe Place
It’s four in the morning and the Blue Andalusian is snuggled on a roost
With the Silver Spangled Hamburg in their house. A Great Horned Owl
Ignores the four who didn’t find their way inside for dark—the Araucanas
And Cuckoo Marans, two of each. The wind had blown the door closed.
They rest on a rib of the sagging run roof, heavy with sleep, unbudgeable,
Brave with the innocence of earthbound, dun-winged things. I am not
Thinking of them in the grey light of my bedroom, I am not praying
For kachinas to throw zucchinis into the knuckles of a nearby cottonwood
At a raccoon who is hungry remembering the way light glinted on the iridescent
Speckled Sussex, such an easy, timid target, friend of the wind-haired woman.
Always squatting to be stroked, her purples and greens were a welcome sign.
The others had squawked and clucked like guns while the woman sat inside,
Listening to the silence around their alarm. In the ruckus the raccoon worked,
Dragging their flapping friend to the nearby fence woven through with weeds
Where she ripped off her head to take back to the tree, a trophy. The rest
Of her awkward body would have to stay on the ground. Upon her return,
Raccoon found it easiest to enter the hen through the vent. Oh, the almost egg!
The shining innards! How kind of the woman to leave the carcass out
A whole day and night to let her finish the feast—sun broiled, braised
In her saliva and the scat of beetles and flies. But I am not thinking
Of any of this tonight while stratus moves in overhead, dropping September
All around us, cool. In this bardo, I rise two times in the wake of my own blood
Threatening stains, barely grateful for walls and predictable dark, the open
Window, a lack of predators, a warm bed, a safe place to make water red.
2015
Things to do in Morgan County
Breathe
Without aversion, sugar beet lime
And dust laden steam
Dream
Facing east, lightning—the blood shot eye
Of someone else’s bruised socket
Dig
Potatoes growing silent and large,
Red and sightless promising roots
Mow
September’s velvet palms; lambsquarters
Make December’s brittle lawn
Sleep
Through crickets sawing love
In the kitchen, the closet, your head
Wake up
On the rolling prairie
Trying to mimic the firmament
2015
Culling Achillea Millefolium
Yarrow was long yellowed by late August.
I had over-waited in the name of over-busyness.
Pruning avoided in July and waves of heat
Produced crisp umbels tossing tiny flecks of seed.
Culling, I clipped skeletons close to ground,
Careful to avoid the living fronds that,
Given more water, might yet green through fall.
Piling dead growth like bouquets on the path,
I knew May would now require more of me:
Plucking ferny volunteers amid flagstones.
The red path, despite hidden plastic fabric
And paving sand in cracks, and beds
Of cedar mulch, would soon be riddled through
With yarrow roots, and more. That is the way
With years, fallen foliage and seed, everything
Becoming dirt and green despite us.
2015
Everything is Perseids
Everything is Perseids
within my head—not beautiful.
I almost can’t ignore the beauty.
In death, master clear light.
Oh the lights
that crash inside!
For the dreamer, what is left
of the body’s habits
flashes through death’s middle sky.
I practice death eyes.
I will have no eyelids
from which to squeeze visions.
Tonight we are told to lie
on our backs with caffeine
and wait or wake for the stars’
train show before dawn.
I know I will not rise.
Not tonight, this wide.
One star is a blank stare.
Another is my hunger.
The final star is my man
driving home from Nebraska.
Come August dark at 2 am,
the sky will fall upon my bed.
2015
The Barren Gilt
The woman will not explain away
her farm-fed fat
or forgetfulness. She is losing
more and more.
Not fat. There is genius
in forgetting.
No accolades. No profit.
The gilt was barren. Huge.
Soon to slaughter.
If enough space,
if enough
is made in the mind,
in the freezer,
poems don’t care
to be written.
Nor do her strong hands,
thinking Other
against her own fat, care.
The farmer said she went willingly.
No fuss but from the boar.
Something—what?—
remembers
belonging to another body.
No padding
under that once-skin.
She forgets. Goes willingly.
2015
Mowing
Lambsquarter, kochia and all their lanky friends
Rise up on the prairie inside our weathered fences
Like lush jungle or high rise apartments. It’s all scale.
Chickens cannot venture through, nor human feet.
Feral cats will brave the dive for rabbits
Or for our fat domestic cat with whom they share
Loose feline ties—unlikely friends. In games
Of hide and seek, they stand on hind legs, peer
Into the waving green, bat paws, prowl for mice
Like shadows of each other every night.
But I am singing for glorious weeds.
Their wordless philosophy filling space
Like old stories or fantasies fill the mind.
The time comes they must be mowed
To save ourselves from mosquitos who lie
In wait, shirtless, hanging out of windows,
Threatening passersby who raise their ire in clouds
With each thoughtful stop to squint at sky.
When the farmer’s sixteen-year-old son—
His country mullet curling from ball cap,
Its bleach blond ends tickling the breeze—
Drops off their Japanese riding mower,
Its wide girth and two arms bent with readiness,
I feel the thrill of machines. The thrill of men
Who make and lust for them, strange Galateas.
It takes awhile to remember the order—
Release the brake, then start? Or turn the key
And then release the brake. The latter brings a roar.
I slip on bruising headphones. Plastic, black, silent.
No music in these but my own voice amplified
With happy tuneless songs for weeds and speed.
I drop the blade, ride the thing in random patterns,
Pass back the opposite way against earlier grains
Of lain-down whiskers. Apologize to wildflowers.
Look up. Laugh at chickens who scramble to the coop
Like… well, like chickens, like tiny, fully-feathered
Velociraptors terrorizing 80s movies, only sillier.
I steer into shapes of fields like a vicious ship.
Weeds lie down under me with little resistance
Releasing swarms of homeless young grasshoppers
In waves. I worry for the garden, wonder if I should
Spare some weeds to lure the hoppers away
From mustard greens, arugula, tasty canopies
Where whole families of toads hunt and stare.
Before long, I’m done mowing the odd triangular plot
Between the henhouse and the hotwire
Bordering the pasture. Over my shoulder,
Chickens joyously dash into the newly opened space
To do their own mowing. My mind, too, is a range.
I park the machine, stretch and scan. Plan a walk
Through areas no longer lost. I am sweating,
Covered in fine grit and blown-back clippings
Spit by careless wind. When Dorell comes home
From the house he is framing, he kisses my neck,
Declares, “You smell like me.” Licks his lips, “Salt.”
And with that word and work, earth trying
To escape us, that is what we are.
2015