poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
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
So what if Google told Netflix I searched Blade Runner trivia in order to finish your elegy?
When I wrote the last line, you know,
the one about electric seeds,
that slant allusion only fellow Dickians
would recognize (my coded love for you
now networked, digitized, available
to you, disembodied brother, loose
electricity), it felt a marvel, like a message
back from you (as we promised, once,
over coffee and cheap smokes, to do,
whoever died first) that ten minutes
after I wrote that line and turned on
the flat screen (no longer synecdochically
only metonymically the tube), Netflix
recommended Blade Runner
as a Top Pick for You.
The coincidence felt so pure. Like you
had pulled strings in the electronic world
to say hello, thank you for the elegy,
thank you for not letting me sink,
obituary-less, into obscurity. Until
it occurred to me, perhaps this is no
message, no spiritual synchronicity,
just a fucking contract between silicon-
licking corporations swindling everybody,
kidnapping kids, herding sheep,
linking algorithms for maximum profit—
assholes making sure whenever I search
for something in one place, I get it in another;
I get it, what I want, and they get me—
my time, my attention: virtual currency.
And then, simultaneous to my inner rant,
I felt, no, heard you burst across space,
you maniacal, mystical mathematician,
you dreaming android, you Dick trickster!
Ba ha ha! you guffawed, Why isn't
the language of math also the language
of soul, of consciousness? I am an algorithm!
Your wireless desire shot through cyberspace
became my voice’s conduit! Of course! This,
your final poetic proverb, enigmatic epigram,
your magnum opus of philosophical jokes:
William Wayne Reed: Algorithm and Asshole.
Under cover of night, I would steal into Riverside
Cemetery, carve it on your headstone, cosmic
old loner, if you have one. I would sprinkle
your unlikely ashes over Dick’s final plot.
I would sing it in alliterative liturgy.
Giggle amen. Goodbye, my loyal friend,
my Gordian tempunaut.
2021
Elegy for Ava
Remember when you were young.
You shone like the sun.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
~David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright
A gently curled smile upon her face,
lids parted in soft, spacious gaze, rose petals
strewn across her tiny form and way,
Ava—drifting like fog along the lowest horizon,
skirted by love, the sturdy hands of six sisters—
passed us on the stone lined path. We followed,
encircled her, held onto each other in October
chill, beheld her wrapped in purple on the pyre.
Four friends stepped out from our circle,
lowered four torches to windows, lit her final bed
from four directions, my brother in the east.
In wait, split logs lay beneath the grate. Others
were leaned like gates against her body,
a modesty, a drape for eventual bones.
In adolescence, the voice of wood cracked,
stood up tall, orange, ravaged her edge, crawled
and licked and spit black coals around a swirling
grey green spiral of smoke lifting languorously
from the center of the pyre. Subterranean viscera,
slowly igniting, finally caught up to rhyme
with the metaphor of her life. Smoke dancing now,
child spinning for joy of dizziness, whirling dervish,
palm up, turning, turning to find the still point
of a god inside, still point of a wolf woman’s eye,
wildness vaporized, rising up from the muddy earth
of her, now a roaring chorus of sunny tongues
reaching, singing the huge bonfire she always was,
released to bend cold air. Her final watery mirage
smoothed to clear space, blue sky, invisible stars.
Our black coats begged the sun.
Feet ice blocks, arms around my lover,
my dearest love, whose quaking stilled
in our embrace, his heart a drum
against my ear, I prayed for more life, more heat,
longed to stand closer to Ava, dreamed
of lounging by her: shoes off, feet naked,
as close to the flame as I could bear,
wondering if my animal prayer was sacrilege
or reverence. But then, the invitation came.
“Come,” the woman said, “Come closer. Enjoy
Ava’s warmth.” Our circle tightened inward,
innocent as moths. Her generous heat glowed
across sighing faces, chests and limbs,
surpassed the weak sun behind us, just above
the eastern peaks, foil to the full moon
in the west. I offered Ava my back,
and to the sun, my squinting eyes. Ava won.
Stories went round. Pagans howled. Buddhists
bowed. Mostly, for hours, all stood silent, humbled,
proud of our friend. It’s all love, she had said.
Oh! to witness this wondrous woman burn!
One day would come our turn to watch
the other become light. Soon, a small white dome
appeared near the end of the pyre: her skull,
I presumed, crown too perfect in circumference
to be wood. I thought of all the hands of family—
born, chosen, beloved Scot—who stroked
that lovely head in life, in vigil, offered comfort
as she died. A fire keeper finally laid more logs
to fill that glowing door, a wooden veil,
one of a hundred falling veils. I believe Ava
would not have minded being that naked before us,
as naked as her stories, the one a self-professed
best friend of countless best friends told
in which she walked in childlike innocence
the last months of her life, bare breasted
in her diaper at a campground when a family
pulled up in the next lot, shy and shocked.
“Honey, maybe you should cover up.”
“Huh?” Ava responded, bent over, tidying
the table, uncomprehending. “You know,” the friend
reminded her, tenderly, “others are not as open
as we are.” “Oh, ok,” Ava said, nonchalantly slipping
the fabric over her thin arms, her shining head.
In commemoration of the open air cremation of Grace Ava Swordy, 21 Oct. 2021