Sample Poems by Tina Kelley

Each of Us
 
By the time it is done growing there are about a billion billion water molecules in a typical snowflake, Dr. Libbrecht says. And on average, he calculates, each of us on Earth has contributed by exhalation and evaporation about 1,000 of the molecules in each snowflake.
            –The New York Times, December 23, 2003.
 
We are all here in these eyelashes of flakes zinging at our faces over and over,
our loves requited and not, the joyful young man I wrote to the summer after college,
 
and Trisha, who said, “I fell in love with a Japanese woman who was making teeth,”
and the man who tried to record all the shapes of all the clouds ever,
           
and the man who felt sentenced to life, accused of abusing a child,
because killing himself would appear an admission of guilt.
 
Here’s the woman who wrote the slogan “Cat bathing made easy!”
and the nurse who said of newborns, “They’re all cartilage.” I see Ella,
 
like a carousel horse, impaled on her fear, lurching forward a bit, inevitably
retreating. I want her to break free of whatever darkness constrains her.
 
I see the drunk woman who called the operator t2ice demanding to talk to her father
in Tennessee. And here’s the owner of a diamond lost on the Broadway sidewalk.
 
Here’s the dad who says “Smile and say pumpernickel” before taking a picture,
and here is the man whose eyes were so dark, no one could see his pupils.
 
***

There is the child who, from a few months’ old, would hold on to his mother’s earlobe
whenever he got tired. And newlyweds who fit together like notes and measures.
 
I notice a few molecules from the man who bought his late wife’s favorite perfume
to spray it on his pillow before he went to bed, the only way he could sleep.
 
And the guy who wanted to write a poem starring the moon, without the word moon in it.
And Em’s friend composing a song, “Sorry for the Things I Did to You in Your Dream.”
 
Here’s the 98-year-old woman who was born with wrinkled hands. The doctor
said she must’ve had all her troubles in a previous life, and looking back, she agreed.
 
And a man who wanted his ashes put in a figurehead of a ship, thinking
the bowsprit’s the best place for traveling the ocean for the rest of time.
 
Thousands of thousands of molecules melt on me, maybe including saints and my late
grandmothers. Come along, look up, mouth open. Take them in, a cold wet eucharist.

To Yahweh
 
“YHWH is definitely a verb form. We can take comfort in the certain knowledge that God is a verb, not a noun or an adjective.”
                        – The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill
 
God is the spray on your lip from the freshly-poured ginger ale.
No, God is the arrival on your lip of the spray. The arcing. The spree.
 
God is definitely not that weird sexuality of wild bird rehabilitators.
God is, instead, waves blown back hard from the shore. At night.
 
Perhaps he is the rumbling scaring done by the haunted freight train,
the shrill ghouls in the back cars climbing over each other to escape.
 
God is weequashing: The spearing of eels or fish from a canoe by torchlight.
God is the inventing of words like weequashing.
 
She is not the fire darkening down.
She is the goldfinch singing the whisper song.
 
And the birthing of a second child, to feel your body blooming.
To feel head, then shoulders, thighs then cord tumbling. To live. To life!
 
To give the initial downbeat to the tympani. To cure mice by placing them in a cello.
To do whatever the scarecrow did with his brains. And to make that acrid or burned quality
 
of the smell of space. To crow, to fly, to gild and gnaw. To mean.
Shape, shear, smear and shine. Play and improvise. To last.

On the Collection of 70 Pairs of Shoes Filled with Butter Found by Hunters in Jaemtland, Sweden on October 5, 2003

    “And now,” Max cried, “Let the wild rumpus start!”
                        – Maurice Sendak
 
Perhaps it commemorates the churn of cloud bank,
the opposite of melt, lard’s own liturgy, the holiness of bale.
Left over from the equinox, it might have something to do with Laplanders.
 
Or dairy voodoo. Musk ox adulation, a summoning of northern lights. An early gift
for a bad Santa, to balance out the cookies and milk. An annually-answered,
secret last wish of a medieval cobbler who dried up from hunger. 
 
Perhaps this explains the sudden appearance of the green-circle GO signs.
And why the encyclopedia salesman decided to dial 911 for a sales call,
and the girl who was deathly afraid of laces when she was four.
 
I would like to know if these were slides or mules or tap shoes, all belonging
to the same person? Maybe they were discards, too ugly to sell at the mission.
Was the butter fresh? lightly salted? Who had to clean it all up? Does butter burn?

I like to picture the perps, giggling to themselves, their shoulders shaking, always
about to be caught by the teacher as they swirled the knife at the end of each stuffing,
smoothing the surface to serrated elegance, just to but not over the rim of the upper.
 
There must have been mead or Madeira, and a soundtrack, and perhaps a waltz
by Strauss or Iron Maiden, a collection of children’s songs, hokey pokey,
Rumpelstiltskin and blind mice. Chicken fights, 3-legged races, swinging from birches.
 
***

Was the moon visible, a half full sly smile? Did they sleep there,
or in their nearby rowboats, to admire their work? Perhaps, finished,
they dove into the fjord naked. Waited for the hunters. Set up cameras. Lit farts.
 
Is this a serial crime? Is there a psychological diagnosis available? No manifesto’d
performance artist, or people for the advancement of butter cows, some joyless such.
Not with waste or spite, but out of fun, by chilly, bushed and bushwhacking Swedes
 
wanting to make it, eventually, to the Associated Press, the Daily News,
The Duluth News Tribune. Were charges filed or fines levied? Or better,
awards given, for stepping out of the iron agreement of sense and act?

Dogged
 
“When two species live together for a long time, each usually influences the genetically- conferred qualities of the other. People may have selected preferred abilities in the dog, but dogs too may have fostered their favorite qualities in people – not of course deliberately, but simply by giving people who used dogs better chance of surviving than people who did not.”
            – The New York Times, November 22, 2002
 
The ones who could spare a scrap, ones who loved ear velvet,
those who were tired of picking up crumbs from the floor and didn’t mind a tongue,
are you one of them, from generations ago? Did your great-to-the-greath
grandmother refuse the men who kicked the dogs that cleaned the carcass
 
and kept away flies and rats and fleas and plagues? Maybe a hound
found your toddling grandpa after he wandered off in the late cold fog.
Of course those with watchdogs woke up before the bears ate them,
and they lived on to have more children than the ones who didn’t.
 
Soon the experienced stick thrower became the skilled spear thrower.
The frequent rump-scratcher enjoyed lower blood pressure and longer years.
Those who spooned with sleeping dogs lived warmer in skin tents. Think
of the sheep, O the lamb dinners and cabled sweaters, attributable to Rover.
 
But it goes further. We learned the break-its-neck headshake seen so often
in business meetings, where we practice sitting and giving our paws and staying.
We learned whistling well, fetching, retrieving. Our canine roots explain our best
salesmen, interns, graduate students, suitors. Not for nothing we call them dogged.
 
***

So when I say, “oh my goodness,” that goodness is shaggy, nudged
ancestrally by the wagging tail, the beseeching eyes, the nose flipping the forearm
of the hand that holds the newspaper. The mailman does not think about quiet dogs.
I forget who taught me and mine to lie on our backs with feet kicking.

Dog lovers excel at tug of war and learn to chew hard on what leashes us in.
We are less asthmatic, take thoughtful walks. We romp more, mope less.
The benefits of caring for old dogs continue, down through the helixes,
into a kinder future. We know that the shawl of the howl keeps us warm.

Immaculate
 
He took me to the new world. He wanted privacy.
Perhaps he didn’t want people fighting over the exact spot.
It is near Akron, where cherry trees bloomed wild.
 
He was a curious sight, at first just a silhouette, a driver in a luxury car commercial,
and he spoke like an anchorman. I was surprised he had hands. But he did.
 
He arrived like a two-year-old running among a flock of feeding pigeons.
There was this phenomenal rising,
of rye grass, of seeds, of the sound of spring peepers.
The sun turned glamorous, like overhead lights on a transatlantic flight.
 
I can give approximations:
Defibrillation by sudden starlight.
Veins on petals of a trillium.
Rolling in hot laundry.
 
It was mostly by talking.
Not flattery, not steaminess.
Talk of tenderness and honor,
courage, love that grows from root to highest air.
 
Holy orgasm sounds like sunrise.
I remember how his head tilted a bit,
and he smiled, and he was precise,
the choir director cutting off a note
and smiling again.
 
I still see him. If I drive along next to railroad tracks,
on sunny days, the threading light traveling with me
is my Beloved.

Christened Christina, Now Fran

     “Mafiosi have whores and loose women,” he says. “But lovers? No.” A real lover might make demands and expect someone who is more than a brutal cog in a corporation of unfettered allegiance. And that, LoVerso explains, “causes a crisis, because if you love and are loved, you have a name.”
            – Girolamo LoVerso, psychoanalyst studying the love lives of              mobsters, The NewYork Times, August 24, 2002
 
I had to love wildly, like a kite flying
til the string soars out,
the abandon and abundance of that.
 
And I had a weakness for bold men. They were black umbrellas,
huge with solid wooden handles, inscribed with a fancy brand,
so wide and deep I felt like some rich gentleman in his fifties
 
had sheltering arms around me as I walked in pouring rain.
And he did. Believe me when I say it was late when he told me
what he did for a living. Killing.
 
I couldn’t understand. It was like reading
letters blurring by, twigs in front of the full moon
fast, seen from the limo’s back seat.
 
The portrait he commissioned of me,
its eyes look steeped in formaldehyde.
He ordered the brass plaque, Untitled.
 
 ***

I wonder. He was afraid of butterflies when he was little.
He grew near the broken windows of his father’s care.
Christ, it was his idea to take home those kittens.

I think of the awful white explosions from hard-boiled eggs.
I think of snow blowing in spirals, creating itself up
from nothing, then sinking down. I think of ghosts
 
in a burglarized house. How often do surnames die out?
I will forget his, one letter at a time. First I will forget
the sex names we had for those times. I’ll forget how
 
if he talked sweet, he looked like he was speaking a second language.
I’ll forget his torso, shiny as snot, when we lay down to sleep, spent.
Francisco, Francis, the saint who would not blow out a candle
 
for fear of hurting the flame. Words sound hollow pointed.
I am listening through a balloon. “Carve your name
on your heart and not on marble” was our last fortune cookie.
 
“Unidentified female (decomposed)
found on roof” – the last police report.
I ran. I hid. My name had not stuck to much.
 
I found a new one. New town, job, numbers. I kept a list
of all the things I ever lost, the gold cross, Raggedy Ann,
plane ticket home from Chicago. The first 27 years. Frankie.

We Eat God, but Not Enough
 
We eat the cardboard wheat of our lord, not the rain-laden drupe.
We eat the bland cantaloupe in his fruit salad. But my host
 
is mango, or the joyful breakthrough of the mystery-glistening
jelly in the donut. My wine is sleet on the tongue, warm in the throat,
 
with the quickening effects of caffeine in the gut. My wafer
gloms onto my front tooth like spinach, so others know.
 
This god is the color of cognac, with hot water’s smell,
the coating of hot chocolate while rain sleepwalks above.
 
When I asked my friend if her senile great uncle enjoyed
anything anymore, she said “bacon,” so I worship that too.
 
I take my sacrament quietly, with barely visible motion,
the horse drinking from the stream, the sleeping infant nursing.
 
I know he is ripe when he yields to gentle pressure.
I know he spreads like a virus through cell and digit,
 
building strong bones and, one hopes, morals,
fortifying me in kindness, steeping in my lymph,
 
leaning back in the La-Z-Boy of my flesh, napping, or
kicking, screaming, elbowing me in my ribs on the interstate.
 
***

God, let me go the week without seeing those cold-coffee eyes
that follow my gossiping, my line-cutting, my exasperation with toddlers.
 
Make me that adjective that means full-of-milk, bountiful,
sharing with others. Make my faith that mix of colors
 
in Nonie’s cookie recipe, cinnamon, ginger, clove.
Send me out full, supple, fast, to feed.