It is the thing you never expected.
Didn’t think to guard against.
Mail drops in through the slot a full year after
with his name on it.
It hits the ground with a gotcha. The one bullet remaining.
The one gaping mouth you forgot to shut.
Grief slipping in seamlessly through the front door
when you had worked so hard to seal up every crack.
This would be a time capsule of me,
I’m talking me.
Not of the Western world circa 21st century
or even this particular zeitgeist extraordinaire.
To be unearthed in some distant space and time,
to disclose a definitive self-portrait
for the ones who follow.
I’d have to start with the coffee mug I drank from every morning for years
that reads Do No Harm But Take No Shit.
A box of Cheerios because I basically lived on them for 20 years.
My books of poetry, I know, predictable, but come on.
That is, if they still speak poetry.
Oh, and my drafts file on disk
if they still speak disk
because drafts sometimes speak louder than finished versions.
A vinyl 45 of I Want to be Bobby’s Girl protected by its original sturdy cardboard sleeve
to resurrect perfectly my teenaged longing skating on Saturday nights
inside freezing cold arenas praying underneath my breath
for someone to take my hand so we could go round together.
They’ll need my vintage Crossley Record Player too and can consider it my donation
to whatever brave new world they are in,
the inestimable value of which may, alas,
be entirely lost on them.
A black and white photo of me at six standing at the edge of a diving board
high above a crowded community swimming pool
because I felt the world was waiting for me then.
And it shows I wasn’t scared;
I wasn’t scared at all.
Among my favorite poets writing today: Tony Hoagland. Few do it better. Who else could unearth a parallel between a blossoming dogwood and a bride ripping off her dress? He inspires us all to dig down a little deeper, to not be complacent. And asks us to pay attention to the things that truly matter after we clear away all the detritus.
A Color of the Sky
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn’t make the road an allegory.
I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.
Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.
Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Last night I dreamed of X again.
She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.
Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;
overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.
Only a series of cryptic signposts on dimly lit roads.
Crossroads aren’t even crossroads.
Just there to force decisions
before there is enough information.
The glass of the compass was stepped upon
thus true north is
anything but true.
We are forced to take our bearings from lesser guides,
the lady on the GPS with the grating monotone,
the priest in the pulpit who forgives nothing,
Dr. Phil and his rigorously toned wife,
who now comes complete with her own line of anti-aging skin care,
developed in laboratories deep beneath the earth’s crust.
Desperate for direction
we connect the vastly unconnected.
We begin thinking
the car’s software is speaking directly to us,
that the only true absolution lurks within a tiny wooden confessional
by way of an invisible voice,
that retinol has something, anything,
to do with happiness.
The Mass in Latin.
The alphabet backwards
What the Beaufort Scale measures
Whether a baby’s cry is hunger or loneliness
The perfect recipe for chocolate fudge.
How to get ink out of silk
When a goodbye is final
How to French braid hair
Assemble a topknot in under three seconds. No bobby pins. None.
The real names of Lady Gaga and Cary Grant and Gopher on Love Boat
The chemical symbol for strontium
How to make a Brandy Alexander
Stop the bleeding
Paint a 50-foot high aluminum billboard.
How to draw a person’s profile using the numbers 1, 2, 3.
Make a slipknot, a bowline, an overhand knot. A lariat loop.
Say “Your lifejacket is under your seat” in Arabic.
“Come this way” in Vietnamese.
Ask me how I could possibly know
How to let you go
And survive to write another word.
I love their whimsy, how they abandon themselves to fun and are able to find it in almost all things. And how they have not the slightest fear of judgment or disdain.
In Tongue years ago, way up in the northernmost reaches of Scotland I popped in to a local shop. While browsing I spotted a wee lassie there with her father, dressed up in her lovely kilt, a matching tartan tam perched at an angle on her head.
She was curious about me – and watched me, as children will do – her eyes following me around the shop.
Standing alongside her I pointed to a tiny toy sheep displayed on the shelf, which was dressed comically in a full perfect tuxedo.
I asked her, quietly: “Now what would a sheep be doing dressed in a tux?”
She thought about it and then announced, seriously:
“Maybe he’s goin’ tae a weddin’.”
I remember even now how it would feel
when you wouldn’t call.
Cursing the ugly faded pink rotary phone
sitting mute at the desk on the landing.
I grew to hate that phone. Its insolence.
Its deadness.
I left the light off on the desk to lessen expectation,
tried not to listen for it
not ringing,
lifting the receiver every ten minutes.
Maybe a power outage, a felled tree limb,
slamming it down again.
I hated you for all of it,
for this stranger I had become,
saddling me with a rejection so deep
I can still hear the deafening sound of that phone
not ringing.
Writers are natural allies.
We patrol the same landscape.
We know the three AM grope for the right word.
We try not to wake anyone.
We stare at a comma. Just stare.
We wrestle with line breaks.
Semi-colons mystify us all.
There is fascination in miniscule detail.
There is a perfect title. A perfect modifier.
If only we can find it.
Our thesauruses are well thumbed.
We concern ourselves with cadence, clauses.
Care deeply about the present perfect tense
versus the past perfect.
We are entranced by detail, minutia.
We know the weight it must carry.
The girl’s hair down, or should it be a braid?
Her shoes – navy blue. Or better, yes –
Royal blue.
Was it raining or threatening rain.
Did she say the word goodbye or whisper it after.
Was the door left ajar on purpose.
Out of all this steely-eyed focus
Nothing is assured.
Recognition, hard won.
What do writers, poets, actually do?
Rebuke in the tone.
We creep into bed in the wee hours
Still grappling with the last line.
Wondering if we came even close.
But on those solitary singular nights
When we may get it right
We dare to join the pantheon before us
Who persisted in the dim light
For what so often seems out of reach,
Leaving bread crumbs behind for others
Should they find themselves
Suddenly
Astonishingly
Lost.
Dolphins are toothed whales. Who knew?
How do you distinguish a dolphin fin from a shark fin? (You never know when that might come in handy.)
Easy!
Dolphins roll at the surface so you see more than just the fin. If you only see the fin and nothing more, head for the (air) mattresses.
I just came in from the beach. I was, as ever on these islands, beachcombing, with my writing pad and pencil tucked into my windbreaker pocket, hunting for “sea glass.”
It takes about 20 years for a piece of regular bottle glass to evolve into the much sought after “beach glass,” ubiquitous now in pendants, earrings, bracelets, etc. Twenty years, that is, of continuous buffeting by course sand and salt and sea spray. The glass must be exposed to all these elements during that time to render it smooth and opaque. And exquisite.
I bring these treasures home and display them everywhere – in wine glasses, soup tureens, ice buckets, any receptacle will do. In fact, the more incongruous the vessel, I find, the more intriguing the display.
These trips never disappoint. In a recent seaside meander I happened upon a diminutive jellyfish, a fascinating creature, about the size of a pinkie finger. They are usually deep blue in color, but their most obvious feature is a small stiff sail atop a transparent cylindrical base that catches the wind and propels them over the surface of the sea. The mainsail in this case is the fish’s protective barnacle, made of a fingernail like substance.
This jellyfish is commonly know by the names sea raft, by-the-wind sailor, purple sail, little sail, or simply Velella. Yes, they are small but they are amazingly resilient. Like Sammy Davis Jr (RIP). Or a toddler resisting bedtime.
When these wee jellyfish die their hardy mainsail remains, to become part of all that outlives us… their weathered windblown legacy.
More beaches – and discoveries await.
Picture me smiling. I awoke this morning, the first of the New Year, to discover I had won the Goodreads.com January 2017 Poetry Contest with my poem The Things I Learned as a Bartender.
My success here encourages me to dive even deeper in my writing and strive to uncover, to examine, the seemingly insignificant details in our lives so often overlooked that help us understand ourselves – and one another.
My fellow finalists are all gifted artists: I am proud to be among them.
Thank you to the Goodreads judges and to everyone who took the time to participate.
Let’s make 2017 amazing. Are you in?
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.[…]
Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother
and Father Remembered.
reviews: 2
ratings: 4 (avg rating 5.00)
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum
More info…
To be alerted to Tricia’s new posts, please enter your email address.
Thanks for sharing