poems by rachel kellum
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Outside the Path of Totality
I never knew my hands were cameras,
Their tiny spaces human pinholes
Of Renaissance technology,
Projecting what is upside down
To trace the world’s lines.
Unable to look up,
I filter bitten sun through fingers.
How did we get here? This point
Where men no longer fear
Gods will steal the day forever for our hate,
Marching through streets with torches,
Effigies of burning crosses, effigies
Of black bodies flaming in leaves.
Even the leaves of lynch trees
Become apertures.
How dare you strive to turn the oak
Against the sun?
Countless crescent suns
Shimmer in astonishing shadows at our feet.
Black feet of the man I love—
Warped with work and callouses,
Black feet I have rubbed with oil,
Touched with lips, toenails like moons,
Their clippings, eclipsed suns—
Walk this earth.
That day in a pause at work,
He took a photo of tree shadows
To give me all the smiling suns,
Sent it through air to me
Taking the same picture to send to him
In the pause of my own day,
Nudging students to care, to see,
To say something.
How dare you strive to turn the trees
Against this love?
We cannot be obscured.
Our eyes are moons and suns at once.
Arms wrap around each other’s sore backs,
Black hands warm on white skin,
White hands warm on black,
Who is eclipsing whom? No one.
We are love, unstoppable phenomena.
One student called it awesome and awful.
We have no control of it. Heatless light.
Another called it midday dusk and dawn.
Take off your cardboard glasses.
Drop your eyes to earth.
Bless light filtering trees.
Look through your own hands
And weep.
After the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and the following total solar eclipse
Zen and the Art of Moving Back into the Middle Class
The new house starts out pure space.
We imagine living in it this way, empty,
Like monks or motes, needing nothing
But to float on light, to wake from a dream.
The trucks roll in with couches and beds,
Boxes of clothes we forgot we owned,
Too many dressers, four decades of Nat Geo,
Easels, two hand-me-down wheels and a kiln.
We break our backs on the chance
There will be time to paint, throw clay, collage.
(Where to store old paintings without a garage?)
Pans! Spices! Bowls! Books! Zafus! We’re home!
Space fills and fills like a mind. We settle in.
The couch is comfortable. Most of the clothes fit.
Enlightenment comes: we are not monks, but parents.
A teacher. A carpenter. A commute. A mortgage.
Left Pointer Finger Relearns her Place in the Scheme of Poetry
Can she type now? Having lost her outer corner to a paper cutter, not unlike a jaunty, tilted beret lifted off by sharp wind, she donned flesh colored bandages a month, forgot how to work unencumbered by pain, accustomed now to pointing up like a tea pinky, up and out of the way.
(Her beret: a bit of faded pink me-jerky topped by white feather of nail. Grotesque little hat! I can’t throw you away! The day we parted, I dreamed of tossing you into roadkill in hopes a Sangre de Cristo raven would take you in and up like a Tibetan vulture’s prayer. But still you sit on a bedside shrine! Abject object of attachment! )
This poem, the first since then, is practice to get her moving again. Her fingerprintless tip, in pins and needles of severed nerve sleep, tries to remember an old dream. She doesn’t hurt anymore.
(Middle finger–still protecting her little sister–strains to hold back on the keyboard, slowly learns to step aside and let her walk again.)
Despite dried tension—the clear-scabbed, tick-sized fact clinging still to the middle of what is raw, she insists: Let me do it! I can type! Right thumbnail bumps her on her way to B. The little cringe passes quickly, whispers: best to keep a honeyed bandage on her one more day till all is finally thin, pink baby skin. What a miracle! Our edges crawl to close around a deep rose center.
December 15, 2017, exactly one month later
Our Range
Even in two beds mountains apart—
An hour drive, two thousand plus feet of sky
Between—I whisper the usual to him, to night.
His name a sigh breathed against memory
Of his shoulder rising up a peak that falls to face & thigh.
Window streetlight sun glows wide behind.
To whom can I pray: spare this silken range of man.
Let us rise & rise. Warm with kiss & palm I climb,
My own eroding peaks in slow collide.
2017
The Mississippi of Motherhood
In the midst of rhapsodizing endless lost days spent at home with my children as babes, toddlers, kids—their faces terrifying lights of innocence looking up, trusting I’d give everything, which I mostly willingly did—those days before a black hole swallowed my resolve, my bed, my home, and finding myself now sitting with my 15 year old son, the baby, who’s lived with his father for years, watching the movie he chose, Colossal—not one I would choose, but touched, nonetheless, he wanted to watch it with me, knowing I’d like the fight sequences, which I mostly did—I am reminded of the Romantic sublime inside the silence of mothering, those eternal minutes, swept up in children rivers, not drowning, no resting, no branches, no bottom, just treading in place yet moving by giant steadfast current, no white water thrill, just slow and brown, the Mississippi of motherhood, water in my ears, shore out of sight, I could never fully surrender to the pull, nor to the brown depth, and yet, with only three years left in my last child’s childhood, I can think of no other timelessness I’d fancy more than the terrifying boredom of slow witness: the mystery of my boy’s voice cracking into man, his whiskers, his leg and armpit hairs thickening by the minute. Please, life, I beg: take my remorse, mundane me to bliss, trade me my every regret for this.
The Deep Sleeper’s Scheme
Our bed, a shallow tin—
I, the turning key.
Our blanket, the lid.
You, the cold sardine.
Come morning, snuggle in.
2017
Reading your Copy of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems
I love to read your dog-eared book:
“No Tool or Rope or Pail,”
page one-fifty-nine.
“After the Argument,”
page one-thirty-one.
Of course, “since feeling is first,”
page one-twenty-seven,
and “The Middle Years,”
one-twenty-four.
Ninety seven’s “Sonnet”
made me rush below.
Finding poems whose pure pages
you have innocently creased,
defaced for your own sake,
is like walking into a private sanctum,
reading in secret the stains,
the dapple of your mystery.
S Mountain, or, "We call it Tenderfoot"
Salidans love S Mountain, and so do I.
It reigns above the Arkansas,
Over little streets like a weathered ziggurat,
One road spiraling off its peak.
Though I’ve always clucked my tongue
At the sight of crosses carved or hearts
Or letters drawn on hills or mountain tops,
Somehow the giant S is a quiet marvel,
When it peers above low clouds
Like Olympus watching over the town,
A place for bicycles, rafts and tiny gods.
A girl named Shea says S stands for her.
A local preschool teacher/bartender
Says it actually is the number 5,
An oracle warning naïve nomads
How many jobs they’ll need
To survive here in paradise.
Two Eclipse Haiku
Moon, a black finger,
Slides through a bright diamond ring.
Midday marries night.
The moon was a coin
Eating the sun, dark money
Eating light from us.
21 August 2017