poems by rachel kellum
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Nasturtiums
Even wrathful beings start out small—
in this case, like tiny, dehydrated testes,
white and wrinkled, promising
protection despite your lack
of faith. You can’t believe it
when green coins form, shallow bowls
for single rain drops. Such pools
foretell pestilence—the crystal balls
of lady bugs and praying mantises
hunkered down in wait, watching
blood red, orange and yellow
blooms unfold themselves like warm
aureoles, ladies’ fans, lips laced
with pepper—so festive, so sharp
on a salad, a human tongue, so repugnant
to aphids and flies they’ll take
their colonizing fleet elsewhere,
to your naïve neighbors’ garden,
buzzing their national anthem all the way.
Spring Beauties
Look, Momma, sping booties, sping booties!
~Sage Magdelene, age 3
It is not Groundhog Day exactly.
There are major mistakes to right. I cannot.
No endless re-tries or deadening repetitions.
No escape. It is just these seven small rooms,
full of the dust and scent of living—coffee,
salty sheets, cut pine, March dog, wood smoke.
It is these sandy trails where daily I greet
my own shoe tread of yesterday,
notice my gait, step off-register, new.
It is the real smile in my love’s morning eyes,
that softness he reserves for me, my hands.
It is my body remembering three toddlers’
heft in night dreams, that sweet grief.
It is the checking of screens for evidence
of their fractal lives spinning presence
off of me, our curving Mandelbrot set
of mothers, my first grandchild sprouting.
It is the digital taking-in of their encounters
with simple, complicated, horrible beauty,
that glimpse of what they do, now grown,
with epigenetic inheritance, that best thing
I had to give. Look, I would say. Look.
This little pink flower, this bliss, this thick sadness,
this roaring rage, let’s look at it together,
squat before it pink and green on solid feet,
shake songs from chromosomal chains and winter.
Let’s sigh, touch the fragile petals.
They won’t stay long. Look, there they go.
Reclining Piñon
The piñon reclines parallel to earth like Manet’s Olympia—
stark, of service, sturdy, propped up on her own stripped limbs.
A full length of bark has died along the south side of her trunk,
left her core exposed, sun-bleached. The north side is rich
with thick bark, pulling life from roots still clutching arroyo wall.
Unlike Olympia, she is not bored when I, a john of sorts,
stand before her. She doesn’t care I am mixing metaphors
in the attempt to get out of my head, into my old body.
Above, green needles spread across a low canopy I can sit beneath.
Like a child on a still swing, I could perch on the horizontal trunk,
clutch branches like two cold chains, kick my legs to nowhere, pretend
this is a bonsai and I am so much smaller than I am. I could
rub against its cave of hard roots, half exposed, shed my tube of skin,
leave a transparent face dangling in the gentle wind.
Stray
Hank didn’t mean to nip my wrist
but he did
straining against my hand in his collar
wrenching
him back with all my weight
his burning leash
zipping through my palms
as he lurched
snarl-barking, vicious with self-defense
as the collarless
muscled neighbor dog rushed beneath
its own fence
the one Hank has puckishly pissed against
for years on daily walks
both dogs hoping it would come to this
wistfully reliving
their days in the streets as wary, wiry strays
starved sovereigns
guarding trash and shifting margins
before the rescue,
the softening, the new name morphing
daily into
a litany of canine emasculation:
Hankster, Bubby
Hanky Poo, Boo Boo, My Little Fuzzyman.
Rilke says now it is time that gods came walking out of lived-in Things
like this book, the one who takes these words
into its skin—sloppy tattoos, and all the books
upon my shelf, a dusty thousand toothed grin
like the bed who holds us, my lover and me
in its palm, and the softest offering of birds
a heavy down upon us, gentle disembodied flock
like the paper lamp he clicks off every night
he and yellow light looking into my eyes just before
dark silence takes the room against its chest
like the woodstove with its hunger
its winter mouth, its flickering tongue
licking at what’s left of trees to warn us
like the truck, the roaming growl of his truck
announcing him for miles across the foot
of this mountain, a voice delivering him to me
like the secondhand couch we once argued about
now a wide lap of ease, worn out by our bodies
sinking toward the center gap, each other
like the convection oven god who serves
us orange salmon on blue plates, or the black pan
who kisses our green chicken eggs good morning
disrobed of the mundane, walking out, what more
could such gods do or say or want, these gods in Things
who love in such excruciating detail they stay
hunger and heat
too cold to lower the honeycomb blind
the suet basket hangs empty for weeks
as if, when I am not a window witness
of their frozen feast, the nuthatch
pinon jay and chickadee are not hungry
after supper haiku
the kitchen faucet drips songs
upon the pool in a soaking pot
the scent of spent soup, a soul
Photographs of Dogs
a day exploring the rabbit warren
twenty-five years of digital files
mined for decades from antique technology
boxy desktops, floppy disks, hard disks
laptops, CDs, thumb drives and now
this hard drive—a terabyte to hold
my life for my children and theirs when I’m gone
a ridiculous search today for the face
of the first dog of my motherhood
Mojo, border collie/black Lab mix
and the second, Leo, my son’s first love
an Aussie mix, both animals ashes now
and the third, Hank, a heeler/Kelpie mix
from Antonito, lining this empty nest with fur
a holy trinity of dogs whose faces
I will digitally carve, tongues in or out, smiling
or serious, collared or wild as dogs are
and send them to China where some underpaid
overworked mother will transfer
three canine faces to fabric, cut and sew
them into silly polyester pajamas
I will wear this winter, thinking of children
long grown who sometimes think of me
whose thousands of digital photos fold
into dogs’, reminder of the attention I gave
the beauty I saw, preserved for a day like this
when my memories have faded into presence
and every evolving pixel and video says
see that: you did it, day after day, witness
slow growth with love. Everything was always
there, the pattern expanding, dogs’ silent witness
a silken comfort to feed, three dogs who fed me
clicking down dark streets, eyes gazing into mine
on couches when the children would watch tv
or forget my existence in exhausted sleep