poems by rachel kellum
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Peripatetic
If you were here, we’d take the trail behind my home.
We’d duck when piñon branches snag our hair
and ponder cactus sleeping deep beneath the snow.
If you were here, we’d walk the trails behind my home.
Like dogs, our hearts would chase wild rabbits into poems
and howl soft clouds of grief into the mountain air.
If you were here, we’d walk the trail behind my home.
We’d bow when piñon branches touch our hair.
Marigolds and Toadflax
Just outside the chicken run rests a crisp bed
of marigolds (useful pest deterrents, but I prefer
their sister, calendula). Volunteers, each year
they seed the bed with gold. I suppose that’s fine.
Nearby lives yellow toadflax—wild snapdragons,
also known, appropriately so, as butter and eggs—
invasive, dainty, medievally medicinal, stubborn foe
a beauty-loving eye always humors early season,
hungry for green and any bloom, until the hands
begin unraveling endless lateral roots, rhizomes
smartly breaking off to protect their mother’s
whereabouts—an impossible to find tap root.
Every year these two overtake whatever
I plant in their stead: heirloom tomatoes,
potatoes, poppies. Up come delicate interlopers
sipping irrigation hoses. Let us help, they say,
like toddlers in a kitchen. Let us spread the butter,
break the eggs! Let us bang the orange tambourines
in this, your favorite quiet corner! By fall the marigolds
win my eyes. Their last bit of color stays still spring.
It is said the dead and gods are drawn to them.
But toadflax! I confess to life, to love, I do let grow
what chooses growth, until the quiet no, that low
voice in the bones: I cannot justify invasion anymore.
Retreat
There stands a child
in no man’s land,
a man in no child’s land.
Hard to say: mine child
or hologram man, lifting
and flickering every age
from the tilted page of earth.
You shift, pace, calculate
the best route to the other
side past barbs where
lives the enemy—a mirror,
a word, a job, a meal,
a gentle touch, a circle
of sober men talking.
You whisper retreat,
worried your voice will trip
the wire in the ear,
the brain, take you both
out. Your voice is not
a hologram. You watch,
wordless, beg the cells
of him made half of you
to defuse, to move,
not move, and the silence
is a yellow fog you’ve
no mask for.
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—