Tricia McCallum - The Music of Leaving

The Music of Leaving The Music of Leaving POEMS BY Tricia McCallum DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO Copyright 2014 Demeter Press Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Demeter Press c/o Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) 140 Holland St. West, p.o. 13022 Bradford, ON, L3Z 2Y5 Telephone: 905.775.9089 Email: info@demeterpress.org Website: www.demeterpress.org Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture, Demeter by Maria-Luise Bodirsky < www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de > Front cover artwork: Mayumi Terada, curtain 010402.

Courtesy: James Hyman Gallery (London) and Robert Miller Gallery (New York). eBook development: WildElement.ca Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McCallum, Tricia, 1952, author The music of leaving : poems / by Tricia McCallum. ISBN 978-1-927335-93-2 (pbk.) Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada. Printed and Bound in Canada The Flower of Farewell Somewhere the flower of farewell blooms and scatters ceaselessly its pollen, which we breathe; even in the winds that reach us first we breathe farewell. Rainer Maria Rilke, Muzot mid October 1924 Contents I.
Everyones Gone to the Moon We look before and after And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought. Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark Everyones Gone to the Moon Why does it have to be your favourite song playing Whenever youre the only one not asked to dance.

There is a sadness in the not being asked that outdistances anything since. When I showed up at the tea dance Id got it all wrong, I thought theyd said dresses. You want it not to matter. And it does, so very much. Its not that you even want the boys who dont want you. You just want to feel somehow good enough.

Girls have it right nowadays. They dance together. They dont wait for a boy. You can wait a long time. Too Late Tomorrow Fates ride on little moments. Outcomes of entire lives can rest on the seemingly miniscule.

Fresh from another of her parents brawls the little girl shuffles to school. She needs a sign today that the world is a safe place, something better awaits. This one afternoon in her life could turn her around, steer her through the minefields. A comforting word, a warm glance her way, the right things happening at just the right time. You know this little girl. Watch for her: the window is narrow.

But you are powerful. She is waiting for the smallest, the sweetest of mercies to be saved. Past Master Among da Vincis countless notebooks, all written in code, or backwards, to ward off thieves, is found a jotting that translates to: Tell me if I ever did a thing. Hardest on himself, his abandoned projects haunted him, and those completed offer little solace: scissors, the parachute, a clock with a minute hand, the helicopter, the first contact lens. An upstart, he sketched Mona Lisa, no doubt, just to keep us guessing. Her lips alone took him 10 years.

Voracious curiosity fuelled him, climbing a mountain outside of Milan to understand why the sky was blue. dissecting human cadavers to perfect his anatomical drawings and, it is rumored, lions! When he was commissioned to paint The Last Supper he reluctantly put aside a joke book he was writing, and throughout his life was convinced that if only we had wings we could fly like birds. Imagine this mans to-do lists: Have Avichennas work on useful inventions translated. Buy mustard. Get a skull. While Visiting a School of
Falconry in London Large birds of prey are quite malodorous close up like this, bits of still-warm sinew and flesh wedged deeply inside their fearsome hooked talons, lodged within the recesses of their dense coats.

The lesson is in progress. Responding to the familiar whistle the peregrine falcon appears suddenly from the treetops, looming, wings spread, its grace incongruous as it sweeps downward by rote toward accustomed rewards, slowing the beat of its wings on approach, the frenetic wap wap, wap , becoming the subdued whoo, whoo, whoo, its outsized yellow plasticine-like feet coming to rest on the students leather-clad arm producing always the same look of sudden terror, then simple astonishment, as the raptors full weight, its other-worldliness, settles, completely, onto its perch. Their large, liquid, alien eyes, their bobbing heads, never still. They hit our marks because it suits them. The one in there carried off a Yorkshire terrier from the high street once. Peregrinus, meaning to wander.

They cannot, they will not be known. Subject Matters Write poems you want to read, counseled the famous poet. And I do. Not of the sunset and whether its pink or more mauve than pink, but of the gaunt young man who watches it distractedly from his boarding-house window unsure exactly how to go on. Through the Porthole I awake in the early light to the smack of water between the hulls. Something draws me to the tiny porthole by my berth, not a sound really, more a sensation.

And there on the horizon looms an ocean liner of such size it appears mythic. All glinting steel and glass, a beacon under the new sun, this monolith of turbines and chrome cutting a swath a football field wide. So far away that neither the bellowing of her engines nor the roar of her wake reach me, rendering her eerily mirage-like, a paint-by-number colossus, frozen in a cement sea. Too far away for me to decipher details so I settle for only imagining the early morning risers now assembling on her decks, settling into chairs with their first coffee, breathing in the panorama before them. Conversation would be hushed, expectant, another idyllic day at sea ahead. But do they see me? my tiny sailboat moored off a small island, might they conjure me as I do them, whether I am awake yet, where I sail to, from, her name painted on the bow? Will some raise their binoculars to learn more, watching as I fade, inexorably, into the shimmer of the new day? Are You From Around Here? What a strange place this is where people apologize after accidentally touching on the subway and advertise for friends in the Saturday paper.

What a sad place this is where lives are expended over real estate and happiness is one pill away. A lonely place where tiny children carry keys to enter empty houses after school desperate, too where speed dating allows for only a rundown of business bios before hearing Next. But miraculous, too when amidst it all the two of us have managed to create a few moments of pure joy. Three Years The little face stares out at me from the faded poster in the front window of the Tops Market, partially obscured by an ad for Downy, and one for Lil Debbies Snack Cakes: Buy one get one free. Stephen. His name is Stephen.

Quick math tells me hes been missing three years. Makes him nine now. This would not quite be his face anymore. The poster is faded, curled at the edges. It needs to be replaced, updated. What are they waiting for.

Stephen looks straight ahead, and will tomorrow, from the same place. With the same face. Passive, calm. Time goes on. He is waiting for us to find him. Hallmark Wrinkles form despite the miraculous claims.

A long red hair ends up in the semi-gloss. The newest cereal promises vigour like youve never known. But I never really noticed a difference, did you? Sometimes dont you just get tired Of saying Onwards. Sometimes building a life on top of all this pain is too much work. The greeting cards all start to look the same, and standing in the drugstore you become annoyed because you realize you never actually saw a daisy that looked like that. A baby so composed, A mother so happy.