poems by rachel kellum
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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—
Pietà
Smoke is filling up the valley.
The Blood of Christ mountains
disappear, erupt from rust
like the ragged rosary in my chest
I am always fingering like Mary
remembering the perfect beads
of Jesus’ newborn toes. Ten, ten,
how many times she counted,
kissed, wished to gobble them.
How many times she washed
his hairy feet. She must have been
at least 50. Old, outgrown, holding
the broken man across her lap,
his bony limbs a liquid stiffening
into the form of her final cradle.
In another 580 years, I'm going to
wake for the bruise, the tarnished penny
rise and dress and search and point and sigh
gaze at the glint on the bottom edge of rust
curb the urge to personify an ancient eye
love him when he says it looks like all the rest
tell him, but, the last one was so long ago
send him off to daughters with a sorrow kiss
hope he spots the wonder from the sky
drag the empty twin below our window
slip beneath the nail, the scythe, the lid
muse upon the paths to shed a shadow
sleep alone beneath this long eclipse
2021
for Dorell, our daughters and the moon