poems by rachel kellum
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Take You There
There is another book,
quite forgotten now,
or was it a robin?
I was hanging there
when it hit the window.
Appreciate that particular
detail, the smudge
and fluff on the pane.
Too bad if the action
moves out of the visual
field. The limp bird
can’t tell you, just
take you there.
You shall, neither of you,
have anything of mine,
the red breast said,
dizzy with haranguing
heart and the whald’s
trivialitah. Some thinkers,
large and small, ignore
these interruptions,
all a trick, these hoops
and games, to make
you quit, an escape valve,
a low place to sit.
Walking the Park in the Timeof Barrett and Kavanaugh
A plastic ribbon
marks one thick limb
of a cottonwood
grown into a V
so tall and wide
it could be
a giant woman
who fell,
who can say how,
from a sovereignty
so high that
when the ground
swallowed her—
hands, head,
breasts, uterus—
only her legs
remained splayed
above earth.
Stunned, immobile,
wooden with fear,
one thigh, leaning out
too far, gartered
pink for the saw.
Because it is too hard
Because it is too hard
to say it straight
I twist it tight
and hide inside
the coils.
Facing
Two days into a quarrel
my face looks old and sad.
An empty sack,
a slack wall with staring holes.
Forgive my stones.
My arms hang with useless hands.
When words finally come,
imitate cairns,
when apology wells up
in me like simple, obvious water,
when you sip and offer
water back, my skin
becomes skin again,
my face a living face.
It is not his Purple Martin
He lived
his life hundreds
of miles
from me. The bird—
nestled
in that space between,
perched
on that limb— is mine.
I will write
a sky.
Baroque Self Help
Homely Rembrandt
in baggy, belted
sackcloth robe,
bristle brushes
upright in a jar
at the ready
on the board,
turning from
your dark self
portrait to catch
the light of a
high window—
Pietà
Smoke is filling up the valley.
The Blood of Christ mountains
disappear, erupt from rust
like the ragged rosary in my chest
I am always fingering like Mary
remembering the perfect beads
of Jesus’ newborn toes. Ten, ten,
how many times she counted,
kissed, wished to gobble them.
How many times she washed
his hairy feet. She must have been
at least 50. Old, outgrown, holding
the broken man across her lap,
his bony limbs a liquid stiffening
into the form of her final cradle.
In another 580 years, I'm going to
wake for the bruise, the tarnished penny
rise and dress and search and point and sigh
gaze at the glint on the bottom edge of rust
curb the urge to personify an ancient eye
love him when he says it looks like all the rest
tell him, but, the last one was so long ago
send him off to daughters with a sorrow kiss
hope he spots the wonder from the sky
drag the empty twin below our window
slip beneath the nail, the scythe, the lid
muse upon the paths to shed a shadow
sleep alone beneath this long eclipse
2021
for Dorell, our daughters and the moon
So what if Google told Netflix I searched Blade Runner trivia in order to finish your elegy?
When I wrote the last line, you know,
the one about electric seeds,
that slant allusion only fellow Dickians
would recognize (my coded love for you
now networked, digitized, available
to you, disembodied brother, loose
electricity), it felt a marvel, like a message
back from you (as we promised, once,
over coffee and cheap smokes, to do,
whoever died first) that ten minutes
after I wrote that line and turned on
the flat screen (no longer synecdochically
only metonymically the tube), Netflix
recommended Blade Runner
as a Top Pick for You.
The coincidence felt so pure. Like you
had pulled strings in the electronic world
to say hello, thank you for the elegy,
thank you for not letting me sink,
obituary-less, into obscurity. Until
it occurred to me, perhaps this is no
message, no spiritual synchronicity,
just a fucking contract between silicon-
licking corporations swindling everybody,
kidnapping kids, herding sheep,
linking algorithms for maximum profit—
assholes making sure whenever I search
for something in one place, I get it in another;
I get it, what I want, and they get me—
my time, my attention: virtual currency.
And then, simultaneous to my inner rant,
I felt, no, heard you burst across space,
you maniacal, mystical mathematician,
you dreaming android, you Dick trickster!
Ba ha ha! you guffawed, Why isn't
the language of math also the language
of soul, of consciousness? I am an algorithm!
Your wireless desire shot through cyberspace
became my voice’s conduit! Of course! This,
your final poetic proverb, enigmatic epigram,
your magnum opus of philosophical jokes:
William Wayne Reed: Algorithm and Asshole.
Under cover of night, I would steal into Riverside
Cemetery, carve it on your headstone, cosmic
old loner, if you have one. I would sprinkle
your unlikely ashes over Dick’s final plot.
I would sing it in alliterative liturgy.
Giggle amen. Goodbye, my loyal friend,
my Gordian tempunaut.
2021