Walking the Burn

Here the roots blew,
sent milk quartz flying.

And here quartz fields are untouched,
surrounded by a ring of char.

I want to say my love is quartz with no reason
for what is spared but wind and water.

Everywhere are black skeletons
of juniper, more beautiful stripped and stark.

They’ll stand a hundred years.
Nothing will eat them. They don’t rot.

I want to say each one
is a word in my hardest love story.

Here is the ancient ponderosa in its black skin and arms,
hope already drilled from its massive trunk.

The flow beneath singed bark bleeds sweet sap.
Though needles on high are green, it won’t survive.

I want to say its beetles
are my apologies.

Here is where wild grasses stopped
burning. Step over the amazing line.

What burned a month ago is now
greener than what was saved.

I want to say that field is my face
before and after you.

2012

Lament of the Carefully Undressed

Cotton capris slide off legs
and stand up low on the wooden floor,
two perfectly crumpled empty columns,
waiting to be stepped into like a morning
in which she wakes alone,
no clothes thrown off like sighs
in small sleeping heaps with his.

2012

The Book

Rachel Kellum's first chapbook, ah, is now available at Liquid Light Press.

What others are saying about ah:

"With lush language and vivid lyric, Rachel Kellum explores the many folds of silence—such sweet paradox! These are poems that open us, creating whole meadows in the mind. Intuitive, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, ah invites us to slough our own layers and lean into quietude." 

~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Miracle Already Happening and Holding Three Things at Once and Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado (2007-2011) 

"Rachel Kellum's volume, ah, embodies precisely what its title promises. In these poems the author plays words against silence not only in sense, as emphasized by the very first poem "Where Words Wait," but also in sound. She works in phrases that seem carefully measured for the breath, and which both connect to and depart from preceding phrases in a way that left me catching my breath. The poems compel the reader to seek an unlashing of the mind from superficial concerns, and to enjoy the resulting excursions, accepting the awkwardness when you return to focus on the corporeal, as in "Waking Into Sleep, Take Your Waking Slow." The poems are airy and playful, supporting the relaxation they propose. Though these poems emerged from a particular year's Buddhist meditation practice, they are commended by the author in the afterword not only to "Buddhist practitioners, but also anyone interested in engaging with the rich space of their own awareness." Indeed the spiritual message in these poems is quite subtle and accessible, with the exception of "Sutra For Poets Who Would Be Buddhas," where the author clearly had to get a few matters off her chest in order to ease back into the breathing. Even this brief turn in tone underscores the honesty of the collection overall. There are a few places in the poems where my ear was brought out of its ease by choices in word or phrase, but such is the effect of the whole that even such minor technical objections did not prevent my enjoyment of this volume, did not shatter the promised ah!" 

~Uche Ogbuji, poetry editor of The Nervous Breakdown

"Rachel Kellum is a fine poet. Her lines dazzle, racing quicksilver across the page. But this book is less about craft's elegant spigot and more the slow burn of shared realizations. From deep in her practice, Kellum's poems walk barefoot over perfection's hot embers, igniting the lyric kindling in us." 

~ Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope 

"In this beautiful group of poems, Rachel Kellum becomes her meditation practice lab. She allows herself to feel vulnerable, and undo many of the usual modes of thinking. In fact, she connects, through the wonderful Bonpo Dzogchen teachings from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, to her inner space, struggling with silence and the expressions of sound and words that manifest from it, and allows these writings to come as metaphors of her meditation experience. Sometimes she finds herself shining, other times entangled with her own words and thoughts. An honest account of her meditation practice, especially when she can look without bias between breaths. Among Rachel's many wonderful words, I stay with these: Dry your tears. It isn't in books. It is you. Sit….Then you become the sky book you read." 

~Alejandro Chaoul, author, international meditation instructor, Director of Research at Ligmincha Institute

Matilde Urrutia

Neruda made of her fields of wheat,

earthen ware of her hidden body,

a lifetime of bread loaves.

Against him, always small,

but large enough to hold

his sea, his sea, his peopled sea,

large enough to chew and chew

and lodge in his small, hungry teeth.

2012

Rooms

There is a man in the old way
whose ears are stopped with European women and children
and family tragedy, though his love might speak
a thousand times the same ten words
begging for a room.

He answers her in non sequitur.

There may be only room in him
for low, lazy rivers and distant white peaks,
forests empty of humans but for monks and screens.
Only the drama of mockingbirds
cannot disturb his face.

Must sound and space be rearranged for love?

Her need is a wave with too many mouths.
There is no solid shore in him to stop what’s underneath.
She’s slid back into the deep dragging grains of him,
placed them one by one on her countless
tongues like the bodies of gods.

2012

Three Animals

Let’s say your hands, just so,
in equipoise
on your lap, can’t stop the space
of your chest
from ball pythoning the pink-eyed mouse
in there.
Just when its eyes start to water,
you change your mind.

It’s not a mouse; it’s a killdeer
caught
feigning broken wings to lure hunger away
from the nest.
What’s the squeeze?
Loneliness.

Or let’s say it’s not a killdeer
but a turtle
looking around inside its own dark body,
waiting.

Eventually something makes you laugh.
Your hands give up.
The python rolls away, relaxed.
The turtle
finds its feet and starts off slow.
You’ve no idea
why it walks around outside you
looking for a shell.

2012

Two-Faced

I’ve become my father.
I’m my own good daughter.
I give myself clever advice.
I don’t neglect my oil.
I paint old bedroom walls white.
I speak in fresh similes, like a fish.

But I do not laugh a wish for people
queer like me or unlike him
to fall into a killing, indiscriminate sea.
When I cry alone, I radically arch my lips.

I was false to my children’s father.
Done cuckolding my own heart, true.
I hurt him because I couldn’t leave. He did.
I broke five hearts, plus one or two.
My father broke six and lived on.
I’m bound to be us both and forgive.

Look! The tsunami passed the safe line.
I am swallowed by his giant wave.
I swim, no fatherland in my aching limbs.
When I cry at sea, my salt belongs to a vast face.

2012

She Did, He Didn’t, I May

I didn’t water today.
Tired, I just want rain
to take care of things,
the way I wanted my mother
to do the cleaning of toilets,
the boiling of juicy roasts,
my father the fixing
of broken-down
everything.

Now I’m a wet sky
in a pinched hose,
a dry, stained white brush,
one chicken served plain,
the Universal Idiot’s Guide
to Impossible Repair.
I give so many directions
to ward off lazy pain,
my diagrams flare.

2012

Without Scissors

A woman braids her silken poems
Throws the rope to ground

Anyone can scale her darkest stair
but she can’t climb down

2012

The Year June Stole August While You Were Away

It is easy to sit in the garden when June has done
its work. When you’ve been parallel to the rain
and the sun has not worked harder than you have.
Sitting like this, tomatoes grow early above your head.
Yarrow’s umbrels do not worry you, or the small puppy
beyond the short fence, whining for you and fresh dirt.
Light pictures inside your eyes blossom like blood.
You look at your own looking. Send peace into the garden.
It sends peace into you like air roots, like stars of lilac water.
You are sure life is a garden rewarding your hard work.

But today you see what little rain and too much sun have done.
What your perpendicular absence in the garden has wrought.
Sit below brown umbrels and rusted fronds burnt on flagstone.
Rearrange grass mulch over holes dug by the dog who leaps
like a deer when you are gone. This year, too often.
Water with a new nozzle, marvel at its rainy volume, at time.
Leaves beyond repair. Pick them. Stunned tomatoes. Pull.
Where you pruned death last week, new shoots. Look deep.
Impossible spring green in a convalescing July. Old pictures swell.
Sit still and bloom in the weary (nearly) now of it, not the why.

2012