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Clearing

Orphaned and standing in the rain

But it’s not as bad as it sounds.

I can hear Bonnie Raitt’s voice from a car

in the parking lot.

A kid just smiled at me from his seat in a shopping cart.

No reason. Just smiled.

The forecast is for better days.

I smiled back.

A poem I wrote in honour of the summer – This Instead

A poem I wrote in honour of the summer.

 

This Instead

There’s a hole in the sprinkler

and the patio needs swept

but not now.

Let’s use summer for something else,

do what people used to do

in sunshine.

Lie together on old blankets

beside a river we happen upon.

Stare up at the blue holding hands

blurting out whatever comes to us.

Time will have no sway.

We’ll just lie there

for hours.

Let the day take us

until we are counting

the stars.

Willing to take on Tony’s sadness…

He Said Turn Here

by Dean Young

And then Tony showed us the lake

where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer

and it had dissolved like powder

so he thought maybe the lake could take

some of the radiant, aluminum kind

he had been making lately.

And it did.

It was a perfect lake,

none of the paint had chipped off,

no bolts showing, the arms that Dante

and Virgil would have to hack through

not even breaking the surface.

Mumbling Italian to itself,

it had climbed down two wooden stairs

back to the beach now that the rains were done.

How strange to be water so close to the ocean

yet the only other water you get to talk to

comes from the sky. Maybe this is why

it seems so willing to take on

Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes

his friends, which is really

many different sadnesses, smaller

and smaller, surrounded by more

and more space, each a world and

at its core an engine like a bee

inside a lily, like buzzing inside

the bee. It seems like nothing

could change its color although

we couldn’t tell what color it was,

it kept changing. In the summer,

Tony says he comes down early each day

and there’s no one around so the lake

barely says a thing when he dives in

and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine

and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,

trying to drag him to safety

and some nights in New Mexico,

he can hear it howling,

searching for him in the desert

so we’re glad Tony has this lake

and we promise to come back in August

and swim with him across,

maybe even race.

 

Ode for Mrs. William Settle

Above the Middle West, truth and beauty
are one though never meant to be.
 

No perhaps or possiblys … no qualifiers at all …  Philip Levine remains my favourite living poet. He sets an impossibly high bar but we learn most from the very best; I am astonished by his talent.

In this magical one to his mother, “Ode for Mrs. William Settle,” he blesses her for giving him more than he gave her.

Ode for Mrs. William Settle

by Philip Levine

In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
17 years ago in a high school class
in Providence. She sighs, and the sigh
smells of mouthwash and tobacco.
If she were writing by candlelight
she would now be in the dark, for
a living flame would refuse to be fed
by such pure exhaustion. Actually
she is in the dark, for the man she’s about to address in her odd prose had a life span of one 125th of a second
in the eye of a Nikon, and then he
politely asked the photographer to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding. Those students are now in their thirties,
the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts
and bright crested blazers have gone
unprepared, though French-speaking, into
a world of liars, pimps, and brokers.
2.7% have died by their own hands,
and all the others have considered
the act at least once. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
the reading I gave of César Vallejo’s
great “memoriam” to his brother Miguel,
not even the girl who sobbed and
had to be escorted to the school nurse,
calmed, and sent home in a cab. Evenings
in Lake Forest in mid-December drop
suddenly; one moment the distant sky
is a great purple canvas, and then it’s
gone, and no stars emerge; however,
not the least hint of the stockyards
or slaughterhouses is allowed to drift
out to the suburbs, so it’s a deathless
darkness with no more perfume than
cellophane. “Our souls are mingling
now somewhere in the open spaces
between Illinois and you,” she writes.
When I read the letter, two weeks
from now, forwarded by my publisher,
I will suddenly discover a truth
of our lives on earth, and I’ll bless
Mrs. William Settle of Lake Forest
for giving me more than I gave
her, for addressing me as Mr. Levine,
the name my father bore, a name
a man could take with courage
and pride into the empire of death.
I’ll read even unto the second page,
unstartled by the phrase “By now
you must have guessed, I am
a dancer.” Soon snow will fall
on the Tudor houses of the suburbs,
turning the elegant parked sedans
into anonymous mounds; the winds
will sweep in over the Rockies
and across the great freezing plains
where America first died, winds
so fierce boys and men turn their backs
to them and simply weep, and yet
in all that air the soul of Mrs. William
Settle will not release me, not even
for one second. Male and female,
aged and middle-aged, we ride it out
blown eastward toward our origins,
one impure being become wind. Above
the Middle West, truth and beauty
are one though never meant to be.

 

Canada: A Glowing Tribute

For fun… on Canada Day, a whimsical piece I wrote about what constitutes being Canadian.

This was my entry into a contest to win a spot in “Barbed Lyres,” an anthology of satirical verse about Canada, edited by Margaret Atwood.

 

Glowing Tribute

There’s this girl I know on the Danforth

who goes to Buffalo to shop

for the bargains on Bill Blass sheets

and with her parents to Polish nights in Orillia

where she says she wouldn’t be caught

dead if the perogies weren’t to

absolutely die.

 

She takes her vacations in Warsaw almost every year

because she tells me the deals on crystal are

incredible and she can stay cheap with her Aunt Stenya.

 

It’s not like Mary isn’t into Canada

she did Banff in ’82

and drove all by herself to P.E.I. in ’84

where by the way she lucked into a

fabulous villa timeshare in the Caymans because

thanks to God she had American Express on her.

In the back window of her Beamer with the Blaupunkt

there’s one of those Canadian flag stickers and it glows

at night.

I mean what do you want from her.

It isn’t like she was born here.

She read to them while embers, eyelids simmered low…

I have been taking a break from writing and reading a backlog of old and newly discovered poetry collected on my bedside table. Nothing I like better.

This is one by Rachael Ikins that has quickly set itself apart, in so many ways, delivering to me the magical moment of understanding I always hope for, look for, in every poem I come upon.

It’s a jewel, a story so perfectly told that it made me feel stronger, maybe even a little wiser, after reading it. I hope it also reaches you in ways that matter.

At Miss Kitty’s Home for Wayward Girls
Rachael Z. Ikins (c) 2014

In the aftermath of winter storms,
broken marriages, death, and a quest
for independence a group of women
various ages, hair colors etc. gathered before a fire
to roast marshmallow Easter candies called
Peeps. Creme brûlée on a fondue fork.

Good scouts that they were, creativity
& indoor fireplace saved dinner. A sudden rainstorm
soaked the plan to cook wieners over a bonfire
in the back yard. Every single woman lost a father
to heart disease when those fathers were fifty.
A strange, sad community.

But the elders, this tiny group of survivors,
delighted to shock younger, tales of sex,
older women, erotic experience, LOL,
sex-toys and dream lovers. One dreamer,
a poet. She read to them while embers, eyelids simmered

low. They slept with dogs, woke up, faced new
adventures. Next morning, poet noticed the fire.
Rekindled through night, ash-camouflaged coals.
Not unlike an older woman; holds deep heat.
One candle continued to waver from mantelpiece after

they’d gone to bed, guarding all sleepers and travelers
through darkness with fragile constant magic.

If I Could, I Would

I often wonder if advice ever really helps us in our everyday lives. Or do we have to live through something ourselves for the wisdom to stick to us?

My twin nieces turned 18 this month and I have been thinking of what I would most want them to know at 18 that I didn’t.  I mean, what’s all this learning by our mistakes and the resulting heartache if we can’t pass on some heads up?

What do I wish someone had told me? Where to begin? I’m exhausted thinking about it and how can I not fall short of such a lofty, impossible goal? But you’re not living if you’re not trying.

Out of that came this piece, “If I Could I Would,”  about trying to concoct a poem that would do it all: serve as the girls’ steadfast template, guide them through whatever may stand in their way. A piece devoutly to be wished for sure and also a concrete and lasting way to remind them, through their very own poem, what they mean to me and the riches they have brought to my life.

 

Do you like my poetry?

Author Michael Ondaatje says of her work,

“Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands, risky, on the verge of falling, and in the end leaping up. I love the roughness and humor and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss.”[7]

 

Even Ondaatje’s reviews are pure poetry…

Shape Shifters

Written last week on our travels in Scotland…

 

I won’t always be able to follow you

down every corridor,

into your next adventure,

all through your wild

precious life.

Just when everything comes

clear,

takes a shape you recognize,

is when it is bound

to change,

utterly.

Remember the cloud pattern you

marveled at,

its perfectly rendered skyscrapers

strung along a city shore,

how it seemed meant for us

alone,

and how in the

instant you turned to tell me

had unceremoniously become

once again

just clouds.

 

(Photo by Joel Koop http://www.joelkoop.com/)

Writer and Poet

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Tricia McCallum

Always be a poet. Even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire.

In essence I am a storyteller who writes poems. Put simply, I write the poems I want to read.[…]

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