Christopher Keller

Christopher Keller Poems

Christopher Keller Biography

Christopher Keller is a poet, poetry group founder, teacher and ultra endurance athlete. He reads his works throughout Wisconsin, Montana and Oregon. Christopher studied at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse in the late 1990’s. During this time, he backpacked through Europe and mountaineered the Argentinean Andes, as well as Mexico’s volcanoes. In 2002 he was hired as an outdoor science teacher in Big Bear, California, which is situated in southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains. The following year he moved to Bozeman, Montana and founded a poetry group there. In January of 2004 he returned to Wisconsin to attend graduate school, and during his studies completed his first book of poetry entitled, The Strongest Hand on the Loosest Rock. Since arriving in Portland, Oregon in 2005, Christopher has worked as the Advertising Director for Portland’s literary journal Poetry Northwest. Between 2005-2009 he completed the poetry books, Blindfolding the Nearsightedness of the Body and Twenty-Four Hours of Darkness, Twenty-Four Hours of Light. In 2010 he was awarded a writing residency at Penland in North Carolina, and later that year a writing residency in Basin Montana at the Montana Artist Refuge in order to work on his fourth book of poetry entitled, The Great Room 2003-2011. In late 2010, Twenty-Four Hours of Darkness, Twenty-Four Hours of Light was nominated for the 2010 Oregon Poetry Book of Year Award. Christopher is an active member of the Oregon State Poetry Association and Oregon’s The Lane Literary Guild. He is the author of four poetry books; The Strongest Hand on the Loosest Rock, Blindfolding the Nearsightedness of the Body, Twenty-Four Hours of Darkness, Twenty-Four Hours of Light and The Great Room 2003-2011. Christopher resides in Portland, Oregon.)

The Best Poem Of Christopher Keller

Mailboxes

Out there, were freeways of Montana wheat fields,
and I didn't need to say anything to anyone,
rolling down the sleeves of an Oldsmobile,
leaning out of that husk with a drunken kiss on my lips,
and I could smell the blackened stalks between the stars.

And what I thought of,
was being eighty and watching a childhood friend refuse
the thin cylinders of fluid that would pause his body
while accepting May and the icicles that had begun to drip,
till there was no reason to stand beside his hospital bed.

It's what I thought of when I was sixteen and alone.

Outside, I would torque my marathoner shoulders and torso,
while Dan drove over an audience of adolescent rocks,
with Kara struggling to look through the black stalks,
and in back, tightening his fists, Tim would hunt for a fight,
in air that would brittle the hands of any rancher.


I didn't care about mailboxes or the hands
that turned the screw driver securing them to their posts,
or if the vomited snow along the culvert
accepted diesel and lemon colored condoms
as much as a mailbox accepts a Louisville to the head.

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