poems by rachel kellum
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On Rain
It’s raining. The dog
is sad, curled up in the misery
of not walking me.
When it stops, the night
smells of wet pine, so good,
like the dreams of city folk, their soap,
like itself and spring woodsmoke.
On a black road holding a leash,
I sniff my shoulder to see if it is me.
It was kind of the rain to wait
for us to finish weeding,
power tooling, before it fell,
though of course rain falls when it will
with no thought of kindness.
How we love to personify
the earth’s indifference
when it suits our gratitude or ire.
It felt like kindness.
three eighth graders
fourteen and mean
mistake cool for cruelty
their hearts, roots tangled
into knots of fist stunted
by a father’s tight pot
Dragon
You have a soft spot for the boy,
the quiet sophomore boy,
whose arrivals always smell
of second hand smoke
and unwashed sleep beneath
a pilled, black beanie.
You’ve watched him fashion
serpents for years:
a dragon head of clay
glued to spiral wired frame,
skinned with plaster and paint,
suspended from fishing line.
Before that, a clay snake circling
a slab rolled mug, red and green,
always red and green. And now,
a plan for stained glass:
a dragon built of shards
he will grind and foil and weld,
build something dark for light
to shine through. So, when,
on the field trip bus, he sits
across the aisle from you,
coughing, oozing green from nostrils
as he has for many months,
seeking tissues from your purse,
just trying to get his body from home
to school to a building full
of fantastical art, you brace
yourself for the illness to come,
sense it nesting, surrender when it hits:
the cough, the sputtering cough
of a dragon, trying to rise,
to rise again and again
from every cave, this one in you.
holding on
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
Do you think you can tell?~Roger Waters
in my early 30s I found a letter
in my dead sister’s boxes
my father had written
during her honduran mission:
“rachel is lost,” he’d said.
i still I wonder at his—at her—
smug surety of a way, holding on
to the rod, the iron rod of mormon lore
i sculpted once in early college—
a frieze in low relief, rod receding
in one point perspective, skirting
a great and spacious building—
the rod that rhymes with god in hymns,
not the psalmist’s bludgeon
shattering sinners like pottery,
but lehi’s dream of a handrail,
the one i hoped would keep me
on a righteous path, headed
for a flaming tree. i let it go,
that cold rail, it’s true— that story
i lived in for a time, that borrowed
tune singing me straight. i let go
the rod for broad sky, like my son,
now driving toward oregon,
feeling lost, he told his father,
trying to figure it out, without knowing
what he’s trying to figure out,
which makes me think he has arrived
like i once did, not lost, dear fathers,
but alive, knee aching, armpits
stinking of onions, tapestries filtering
morning light through rolled up windows,
preparing to bathe by spray bottle
in a walmart parking lot, that bardo
where no one lingers long,
holding on to a wheel.
for grey
reading abeyta from her collection
faint scent rises i bury my nose
in the spine
of as orion falls inhale, enter
James’ basement
the must and smoke
of friendship
her cool hands on my cheeks
these pages
in Puget Sound
Wince into some corner
of your mind as you walk,
dragged along
by will,
by love for your daughter
who has found winter
in the water,
found a way
to move forward
and through.
Strip down
to barely clad,
body curving
every direction over stones,
the shoreline of your skins,
your mothers’ mothers’ blood
pulsing ancient tides
against spring wind.
Walk with purpose,
you are told,
no hesitation.
Pour your toes into the Sound.
Wade into the icy cold,
into liquid salt.
Notice water crawling
your inches and forget
all the words that name
your parts.
Silence the monologue
cataloguing your discomforts.
Gather the reins
of your ragged gasps.
Gently pull into quiet breath.
Hold up your hands,
trembling supplicant,
above the surface,
like those birds on piers
spreading wings
to any thread of sun.
Open and close
your fingers like pumps,
like hearts.
Press palms together
against lips’ silent syllables.
Catch hot prayers,
animal gasps and shudders,
death’s promised rattle
not yet death.
Waves lick your clavicle.
Calm cold seeps into limbs,
follows blood and lymph
into deep caverns.
Don’t fight it.
Notice small waves’ texture.
Notice a lone seal’s distant head skim
and plunge,
surface there
now there
now gone.
Turn to your grown daughter
who brought you here,
who stares out past
the farthest horizon.
Look for it.
for Sage
Beckett’s Teacher Confesses
I realized today
while reading Act I,
I am not Vladimir
or Estragon. Aimless vagabonds.
I am Lucky.
Not lucky, Lucky.
The one who carries the bags
of the rich, and the hard stool, who teaches children,
not on purpose, to carry bags, too,
who puts down the load to dance,
or think, when Pozzo cracks the whip,
who used to dance and think for joy
before the QuaQuaQua
for the A-cacaca-demy,
who now collapses, exhausted
who stands and carries on automatically
when someone puts the handle
of the bag in my hand,
says, Nothing to be done.
Modern Silence
John Cage called
silence traffic
more or less true
of towns and minds
not two a.m. a mile
outside of Crestone
Furniture of the Dead
This morning after waking, I bathed my sour hair
and dressed in cotton woven by machines. Drifted
to the living room with couches snagged and draped
with children’s old bedsheets and books: protection
for cushions from cat claws while we sleep.
I could be a ghost waking up months dead, wandering
the family mansion full of dusty furniture, suspended—
freeze-tagged kids in Granny’s thin whites on Halloween,
no holes for eyes. But today I am alive. Not dead.
I undress the couch, the chair, to live in my house,
drink tea, watch light crawl across cobwebbed walls
and leaning plants, browning bananas in a bowl.
Today I sigh to sit by this tar-stained, stained-glass lamp,
the one by which I used to read in Laurie’s basement
to be near her—cooly smoking. The lamp holds on like grief
to potential light, the way I do, anticipating night, when
I can pull this chain and that, ignite its double bulbs,
glowing like my friend’s clear eyes through twisting smoke.