poems by rachel kellum
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Buddha Sends Her Son to Bible School
Morning light is low
And yellow. Dirt roads
Of the small town glow.
Cattle on the outskirts
Shine like gold.
It’s early June.
Buddha drops off
Her son, now eleven,
At Bible School
With his best friend
To learn the stories
From which she grew
Like dandelions.
Everyone needs
Something
In which to root.
From behind the windshield,
She sees young mothers
In long, sleek skirts.
Their hair is clean and filamental.
Their shoulders are not bare.
They carry babes on soft hips,
Hold small, washed hands.
Plump greeters in cartoon t-shirts
Smile at the welcome table.
A breeze moves their white hair
In waves like rows of wheat.
Cowboys for Christ,
A bumper sticker reads.
A puff of cottonwood floats
Through the passenger window,
Past Buddha, out the driver’s side.
The air is so many flowers sweet.
She sees only a peony
The color of lipstick.
Unexpected grief rises in her body
While she drives home.
The joy of congregation.
The shame of we’ve missed you.
The Spirit throbbing her throat.
The day it lost its name.
Perhaps she could return
To church.
One metaphor as good a door
As any,
If one remembers metaphor
Is only a door.
The morning passes.
Later, planting seeds with her
In prairie dirt, the boy confesses:
If the Holy Spirit, that part of God,
Is in each one of us, why do we sing
In soft, high voices “Only God is Holy”?
I don’t like to sing that song.
Later still, sunburnt, the boy
Sips water at the kitchen table,
Speaks of baptism in the name
Of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Buddha asks him, Where’s the mother?
His eyes search the space of the room
As he relates the shortest scripture:
Jesus wept. For Lazarus, his friend.
He then quotes God who spoke in flames,
I am who I am. The bush roared bright with anger.
And further, I am the Lord God,
And there is no other besides me.
Confusing books of the Old and New Testament,
He proudly pronounces numbers after many names,
Uses new words: Isaiah, Exodus and verse.
Buddha remembers when she first learned
I am that I am,
Considers who and that and Popeye’s what.
Her son declares this week
The best of his life
Though neither he nor his friend
Found it fair, at first,
When they didn’t win
A prize by school’s end.
That’s bull, his friend had said.
When their teacher realized
Her mistake, she gave them
Each their just reward:
Matching water bottles
For good behavior
And a flashlight to share
For memorizing God’s word.
There is no belittling light
Of any kind in its becoming sound.
Buddha wakes up
In the way words become flesh
And dwell among us.
2014
Coronation of Kingbirds
All morning the Cassin’s Kingbird
Mistook our bathroom window for sky.
Yellow belly black beak
Black beak yellow belly
Could not crack the why
Of that blue shell.
Upon each failure he’d perch
A foot away, consider the shining wall
With blinking black eyes,
The softest crown of grey.
He couldn’t see the concern
Of black and white
Lovers on the other side, nor hear
Our not unkind laughter
At his error—we who had
Already been bruised and crowned,
Having found what he sought
Behind the glass.
2014
Simultaneous Contrast
The wind is blowing
In the direction
The heifers face.
Indoors and kitchen-warm, I assume.
Here, my man’s high levels
Of natural attention turn me
On: carrot rounds,
Slivered green and yellow rinds
Of half-mooned squash,
Smirks of red and yellow
Sweet peppers, onion piled
Purple on bamboo board.
Each one equally machine-thin
By his blade and angles, his
Down-neck, his black-brown wrist.
This isn’t perfection
Or anxious precision
Or fear of variability—
His sustained vision
Of what is simple
In hand, moving.
Before us, our window.
Without camera,
This is what I have:
White-tipped, green t-posts
Holding up paneled squares
Of last week’s goat fence,
Standing as receding elevens
Framing unplanted earth.
Behind this: weathered electric pole
Parallel to seven wind-torn elms,
Evenly spaced like a plan
For solitude and shade.
The fourth tree’s top: broken off,
Hung up in the arms of the next,
Twenty feet up, parallel to the ground,
The wind’s tori gate.
Behind this: evenly dispersed herd
Of red heifers, everyone mouth-to-earth,
Bowing to green, everyone facing south.
The retina competes with itself
To have it all. We can’t help but stare,
Unaware of this registration
Of beauty born of visual distress,
The vibration of complements.
Don’t look for symbolism here.
This is about irresistible looking,
The way space plays,
Moving hues between
Your eyes and the horizon.
Soon, while stir-fry waits
For acini di pepe to swell,
The cattle turn, everyone facing north.
Direction is not always about wind.
My lover says they are eating
Their way to bed.
2014
This may not be true
This may not be true.
My father doesn’t remember exactly,
But says he may, he just may.
I was in a dress just above my knees.
I want it to be white with red trim,
Prim, crisp cotton. And my hair just so,
Large curls reaching up, and my lips too.
He carried me on his hip, I would say.
Sat me in place on the bench beside him,
Or on his lap, I was so small, looking up and out.
Fronts of warm wind reached from him,
And he smelled warm, like breath
And spiced sweat,
Like a summertime hug, his smile close to mine.
They pulled the bar tight across our legs.
The light made him squint and search the sky.
So I looked too.
And the wheel began to turn. Up we went,
Round and round. So high into the air until
We could only go down. There were probably
Clouds, or not clouds, and everything was blue and sun,
Everything was two smiles, two hands clasped,
Mine a bird in the high up nest of his.
Maybe I was two.
A few years later he left my mother and us for another
(Though he would disagree, say he did not cheat,
It has always been the family mystery.)—
Toothy Wilma with boys who chased to kiss us—
And it didn’t last.
And he was lonely and cried, he tells me now.
Rode his Kawasaki with the wind, and tried to keep
Numb watching the Gong Show or Three’s Company,
Or CHiPs, in an apartment whose red curtains
Made everything red, even my naps next to him,
Whispering I wish we lived together, and he said,
Sometimes things can’t be what we want,
And I cried in the heat of that sorry truth.
And he held me till I slept.
And I cried with my mother too, on her lap,
In the corner of a dark dining room, on the extra chair,
When he didn’t call but every few months
And holiday visits were not enough, and the years spun
Blame. I made him pay.
I wrote the kind of letter only a twenty three year old
With some psychology in her pen could write.
He was surely the archetype of my distant boyfriends,
Too old, too wounded, or too far away.
And now, a gardener instead of a student, I could say
He’s the soil of my two failed marriages, my heart
Too lonely or wild a weed to be pruned and tamed,
But wanting to be, just the same.
And now, I see how he could leave, how he could trust
The wheel, how he could love me, and leave me,
And return, and be
Far away and as close as my own breathing.
As unfaithfully faithful to himself as I have ever been.
I have given up believing in him, or me, the free.
And I’ll never know if any of this is true.
But what is true is that I want it to be,
And that we have always been turning
On a wheel into sky above things,
Far from where people on the ground
Can see what we see, and then falling,
An arc of falling over the edge into nothing
Toward earth, never hitting, just— look! –lifting,
Moving blind backwards so we can move forward, up,
Past the red of what we feel, even when we aren’t strong.
It isn’t us, just the hub doing what it does, reeling
Us along into the song of the ferris wheel.
2009/2014
Black Rosehips
Rosehips shriveled black,
unpruned by the year’s white shears,
will not flavor tea.
2011, 2014
It starts as soft breath
It starts as soft breath—
stillness stirred beyond itself to move—
combs grasses back
like the gentlest mother’s brush.
It then begins to hurry, fret,
rocking cars like restless babes,
leans against trees
like the deepest mother fatigue.
Nothing firmly rooted moves.
Boughs break and fall
clinging to new nests.
Birds mourn.
A roar
groans like birth.
Mother funnel delivers dark dust,
rotted cottonwoods,
rusty cadillacs, family photos,
white cribs, pink bathtubs,
precious darlings
into the trembling hands
of a yellow green sky
that cannot hold them
long enough to cry.
2014
Marginalia
You, the even pages,
I, the odds.
All our words
And margins touch
In sleep.
Come dawn,
We shuffle air,
Spread wide
The spine,
Gutter to the sky.
2014
Vampire
A self loathing bed.
The door in the other room closed.
A knack, a loaded weapon
In hand, formidable.
For crissake, post-sex bolt out the door.
Prize getting naked regret.
The expression contradicts a room
For doubt.
“Sex,” under breath. “Over it.”
Stung and grateful for frustration.
Needed.
She couldn’t remember sated.
Vibrated senses.
Higher frequency too tight for her body.
Tangle still-ripe.
Bite drawn blood.
The strange tongue enigmatic.
The fleeting sense ought to be appalled.
Horrified.
But she lay dark, twisted.
Craved.
2014
A found-poem from Lara Adrian’s
novel, Taken by Midnight, p. 174