death – Tricia McCallum

Ring Them Bells

May 5, 2023 No Comments

I share here a remembrance of Gordon Lightfoot, written after seeing him perform back in 2012 on a rain-soaked evening in Toronto’s Massey Hall. I never sought to have it published. I somehow knew it should wait until now.

Textbook weather for Gordon’s concert this evening: rain-slicked streets, brisk winds, classic moody November evening in downtown Toronto. His band was minimalist, as is his wont. To wit, lead guitar, bass, drummer, keyboards, and himself. None of them under 60. I’d seen a couple of them on stage with him many times before.

Gord struts out with his characteristic long stride, guitar at his hip– on the stroke of eight bells, of course — to thunderous applause, seeming still a little shy and embarrassed by it all, amazingly. (He even joked about the night before how, because of the city’s subway breakdown he’d had to start eight minutes later. Eight whole minutes. Oh the horror, he said. And we all knew he was only half kidding.

Opened with Did She Mention My Name? Closed with Blackberry Wine. In between, everything from If You Could Read My Mind to A Painter Passing Through.

The crowd was quiet (save for the one requisite (by then) shout of “We love you, Gord!” very attentive (dare I say, Canadian?), reflective, appreciative, almost conspiratorial, you know that feeling Gord (and Gord alone) inspires in hometown crowds? It was so obvious everyone there was delighted to see him back onstage for another go.

Yes, he is frail, ravaged, bone thin, and easily looks his age (71). Actually, he looks like any of a dozen down on their luck guys who used to hang around (seemingly in rotation) outside one of the hotels in the small town where I lived as a child. His voice wavers and falters from time to time and he whispers when he should shout, but no matter. His spirit is fully intact. His delivery is so evocative, so exquisite, he reminds you with each outing that he is the one who wrote the stuff – that no one gets it like he does — and no one, of any age or stage, will ever do it better. Michael Buble, take a seat. And hush.

We did hear at least a few pins drop at Massey Hall that night, especially during Song for a Winter’s Night. (He rarely does that tune and it was utterly bewitching.) His rendition of Step Back (one of my top five of his) was rollicking, everyone up and rocking, what a great tune that is to move to, and then he headed into Early Morning Rain. Wistful, evocative, iconic, all.

Let it go/Let it happen like it happened once before… from the song Shadows. Another captivating rendition. This one in particular brought to mind Dylan’s comment about Lightfoot: “Whenever I hear a Gordon Lightfoot song, I hope it never ends.”

His banter with the crowd was so relaxed, so unscripted, he charmed the boots off all of us. He riffed randomly, about writing songs on airplanes, the perfect place for it, he says, with the juxtaposition of stars above, cities below… getting his “shoulders lowered” as a boy at the town barber shop in Orillia, and his joy at being “home” and playing for us again.

A gentleman, pure and simple. And a poet non pareil. By the end, he even makes you believe his lustrous words: “Everything will be fine by and by.”

A legendary story about Lightfoot resulted from a concert he did long ago in his hometown of Orillia. A young man in the audience was hit by a flying bottle and had all of his front teeth knocked out. Lightfoot heard about it and went to visit the young boy, on his own, no fanfare. Before he left he gave him a check to cover all his medical expense.

The fire is dying now, my lamp is growing dim
The shades of night are liftin’
The morning light steals across my windowpane
Where webs of snow are driftin’
If I could only have you near
To breathe a sigh or two
I would be happy just to hold the hands I love
Upon this winter night with you.

Lightfoot didn’t care for interviews. Apparently, he was rather shy. But no matter. His songs tell us everything we need to know.

Listen to The Affair on Eight Avenue, for me always his most exquisite song. https://youtu.be/KTu_Uu0TgTQ

I will miss you, Gord. We all will.

The Weight Of It All

January 14, 2023 No Comments

Life’s not hard enough,
so let’s invent a foe so fearless,
So shameless,
That it doesn’t toy with your dreams
So much as mocks them.
A tyrant that hands you back, ravaged,
After it’s done its worst.

And even though we call on everything we know
In defense,
Science, all of it, yes,
The tiny powdered capsules of hope, thrice daily,
The temples gelled, the paddles clamped securely,
Still we are brought to our knees.

We may summon the gods, too.
If there be such things,
And if there are,
Now would be the perfect time
For them to show up.

Potential Poetry

January 5, 2023 1 Comment

The sky. And the sky above that.
The exchange of unmentionables between mouths.
Other people’s shame.
My friend says we never write about anything we can ever figure out.
For him, it always involves sadness.
For me, it’s a language I haven’t quite found the language for yet.
The astonishing smell of a baby’s head. Morning coffee perfectly doctored.
Clothes fresh from the line. Mark Knopfler’s ballads.
The sound of someone leaving who doesn’t want to be heard.
Other voices in other rooms.
The day I decided getting out of bed was a greater effort than I could summon.
The high school dance at St. Joe’s where I stood all night against the wall pretending it didn’t matter. The time in Grade Six when Sister Benedict asked us what we wanted to be and I said poet
and they all laughed. Poetry lurks in the lines between things most important and least said.
A way to bear witness that we were here.
How I might have found a way to conjure words no one else had,
if I’d only found them.

~~ Tricia McCallum

(after Rebecca Lindenberg)

I Am

December 15, 2022 No Comments

I am from my mother’s bed in a Glasgow tenement and walls
thick with coal dust.
I am from Saturday confession and identical Catholic school uniforms
and unflinching patriarchy.
I am from melancholy to the marrow of my bones.
I am from not up to it but showing up anyway.
I am from faking it so very well no one ever knows.
I am from a lifetime of hard-won lessons of when to shut up and
when to kick doors down.
I am from finessing the difference
I am from reading the room the way all women must.
I am from puffers and steroids and Prozac and poetry.
I am from squamous cells and ovarian tumors.
I am from kicked to the curb and too tired to care.

I am from returning home scared to death.
I am from swallowing bile.
I am from too many calm downs and too few stand ups.
I am from too smart for my own good.
I am from you’ll never get a man that way.
I am from childlessness.
I am from bartending and short order cooking and cold calling and
traveling the world alone.
I am from 36,000 feet up serving cocktails in turbulence and
high heels and tight skirts and never spilling a drop.
I am from 30 feet down in dank basement apartments,
I am from a Glasgow tenement.
I am from losing what mattered most.
I am from survivors.
I am from optimists.
I am from unbridled love.
I am from a place called I’m still here.

Gabby Petito

September 26, 2021 No Comments

For all of the girls and the women who trusted too much… those found and never found, the lost ones, the lonely ones, whose stories go untold, their heartache entombed alongside them.

Last Text from Gabby Petito

No service here, but at least I’m free
from the cage bars of my body;
remember what I’d blogged in observation
of birds, chipmunks fattened on the scraps
left in abandoned campsites in the cold
after the fires are snuffed out, and the stars—
oh, these stars—how they’re arranged
without number, and how they disclaim
the disappearances inferred of them,
but instead declare the secrets upon
which all darkness preys. Insects
I doodled on notecards
and sent home already will testify
of my whereabouts—imagine the how,
the when, the why revealed in the
caricature of the dragonfly—
I’ve lain looking up so long,
the windswept grass retains
the shape of my body, moonlights
as my spine; after the rain,
the sky in some parallel agony
soaked out of me some heavier
silence I’d always felt in the earth,
and to it, a kind of mooring far more
real than the live honeysuckle
and wild licorice I could almost
smell; and the caddis with their assorted
thoraxes retract into clipped
thumbnails and cut
grass; their buds—my own
body—are, to the pile of ants,
a worthy and contrite fodder.
What astonishing weight
my own thoughts make
at the moment, the unravelling
of many ropes set to anchor;
think tie-dyed everything,
the clasping peppergrass
and what lies in the green water
under algae, what sloshes through
the culverts mixed with sand
and gravel. Please know I was not
gunned down or knived in half,
but cast on a spit; I was spun
clay on the wheel of a potter.
He created the soul of me.
He loved me, then hated me.
He hated me, then kissed me.
He kissed me, then hit me.
The ocean of him swept
over me, a certain, undocumented
upwelling, of all the places we’d been,
cheap-shotted and piece-mealed out
to sea; and even here I am writing
in my mind that knows nothing but
to feel my heart leap out and breathe
into me everything that had died
in it before.

~~ Susan Doble Kaluza

Waystations

August 23, 2021 No Comments

The test results we await from teachers and doctors
are neither good or bad –
yet.
But we give that time away in worry,
the between time.
The tent posts of our lives, ever the attention whores,
the limelight stealers.
But it should count for something.
The dense weighty bud of the peony, its tight, shy secrecy
before its brazen unfolding.

Anticipation can be delicious,
the finale but a part.
Your wait for the bus at dusk in the cold
when a stranger mentions the bruised light in the sky.
That’s what he called it:
Bruised.

Pay day, two days away,
but while you waited,
those delicious dollar store finds.
Your long destination drive,
so full of discovery all on its own.
The café owner in Alameda with his Hollywood memorabilia.
And wasn’t Joan Crawford a firebrand.

I am always amazed when any of us are asked
what we value most
and we don’t say
instantly:
Time.

A poem by Tricia McCallum called Captive Audience. A bleak doorway facing out to a barren vista

Afghanistan

August 22, 2021 No Comments

AFGHANISTAN IS YOUR FAULT

and also my fault, the way I pretend the world
isn’t happening, organizing my closet by color, by
season, touching the soft fabrics instead of reading the news.
The way I’m back at my window where I watch
the neighbor’s pride flag’s colors reflect the mood
of the moment, how it was twisted when the pandemic
started, how it has been twisted since the pandemic
continues, but right now it is flattened, faded
in a late summer light that aches with coming autumn,
its stripes of many colors pulled taut by the wind
like a dress set to dry on a line, while the people of Afghanistan
are rushing the airports, they are swarming the tarmac,
they are surrounding the airplanes as if they can leap onto a wing
and be lifted away from what’s happening to their lives,
the way the women are facing a terror bigger than tears
or the death of the earth, looking into a hole where the sun
had just been blooming, wrapping themselves again in their black
that had gathered dust in the back of their closets, the way their black
is mourning for the textbooks that will be burned, the way their black
is mourning for being walled again in their homes, the way their black
is mourning for the sun as it dims and the earth grows cold
and all the birds give up their plumage to die beneath the folds
of their colorless wings.

Meghan Sterling

Bioluminescence

June 26, 2021 No Comments

Simply too good not to share..

Bioluminescence

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful

though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden

by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled

by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld

underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby

dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed.
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay

alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company

of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused

like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered.
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions

we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom.

It wasn’t the sea.

~~ Paul Tran

In a Maine Junk Shop

May 31, 2021 No Comments

Others’ lives are on full display here.
Through the late afternoon
The light makes its way through motes of dust
Onto collection after collection.

The shrewd pickers look right past the string of musty pearls
That catch my eye,
Honing in instead on a pair of tiny opal earrings
With an eye to resale.
They know how this is done.

A table off on its own offers cloth-bound books
Arranged by colour.
Who would devise such bizarre cataloguing?
Pride and Prejudice propped up against
Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy,
With their similar covers of cherry red.

An exhibit of photographs comes next.
The people shown with seemingly little to smile about.
Matching sepia toned oval photos show three young girls, sisters it would appear,
The outer plastic sheath now splintered and yellowed.
Obscuring, endangering, what it was once
Meant to preserve.

The savvy pickers haggle now with the bored shopkeeper
But none seem the least concerned
About the back story. Who might the earrings have been worn by, I wonder.
What young girl’s hands carefully inserted the tiny buds?
Before what special evening.
What hopes lay in her heart as she descended the stairs for the dance.
Did she later tuck them away for a daughter
Who was never meant to be?

We want it all to mean something.
So we hold on to the unremarkable snapshots of those long dead,
A child’s single mitten,
An ancient love letter in painstaking calligraphic script.
A matted braid of strawberry blond hair
From whose head we shall never know.