I used to love September, but now it just rhymes with remember.
Dominic Ricciletto
A Careless Lover
Summer takes its sweet time,
Slowly strips your defenses,
Has its way with you,
Then abandons you,
Alone,
On the dock,
In the chill of an October dusk.
Ravished. Spent.
Shivering.
Wanting more.
Just the slightest droop
in the leaf of the phlox.
Its tender blossom holding up,
but not for long.
A sudden chill reduces the dahlias petal by petal
to ragged pink flags.
And there, see, the delicate African daisies
suddenly resigned, curling sleepily into themselves,
exhausted debutantes after the ball, when yesterday
they held the ballroom captive.
The valiant cosmos, once reaching to the sky,
Their sturdy stems succumbing to the driving wind,
These last holdouts,
These Olympians of the garden
Roundly defeated.
Listen. Lean in.
A clock is ticking
somewhere.
It ticks not for the garden.
But for us.
~~ Tricia McCallum
When? Saturday, June 17 at 7:30 pm
Where? the WACC, 475 Whitevale Rd
Why is it different?
Tricia McCallum, our resident poet, will not only share some of her poems, but she is inviting you to share a poem that has a special meaning for you.
Before this June rendez-vous, you have the opportunity to think ahead about which poem you will choose … It may be the poem that first springs to mind whenever you hear the word poetry, or a poem that comforts you each and every time you reflect on it.
Tricia plans to share a variety of her poems. And as anyone who reads Tricia’s work knows, she shares with us regularly online, what she writes about is … everything.
If you wish to participate in this poetry sharing event, email her at writer@triciamccallum.com
Why did I not grab every moment
and make it sing,
look into people’s faces and find stories there
to take me into my old age.
We don’t take the time,
Do we?
Blithely we pass unexplored roads,
agonizing instead
about the trappings of our lives,
the matched sets of things.
(For Keeps – excerpt)
She was impossibly beautiful, astoundingly poised. She was, on that summer evening as she stood by the camp fire, perfect.
There are moments in our lives that change us and how we see ourselves forever. There are also people that have that same effect on us. Yvonne who I write about here, was one of those people in my life.
Here is text of the poem:
Enough
A barbecue and swim after work had brought us together
around the campfire that summer evening,
An impromptu thing teenagers do best:
You bring the beer. I’ll bring the chips.
I watched her run up from the water laughing.
As I write this her name comes back to me: Yvonne.
Fresh from her swim she stood close to the fire
in her tiny yellow bikini
drying her waist-length sheet of onyx-colored hair with a towel.
She seemed so utterly assured of herself in the task at hand,
so composed for a young girl,
tossing her head languidly from side to side
then taking a large hounds tooth comb and slowly
pulling it through
that glorious hair of hers.
She must have known we all followed her every move,
couldn’t help but know it by the silence
that had enveloped her ritual,
the flames casting an unreal glow on that hair,
that perfect form and face.
The men particularly stared in awe
at this goddess from Okinawa
who’d ended up in our backwater
of all places,
in their midst.
I watched the men’s faces watching her
that night,
knowing even at 16 I would never possess the audacity
that was Miss Yvonne Tsubone’s that night,
and for as long as it lasted,
that which comes from sheer and absolute
physical beauty,
a calling card that says,
without words:
I am perfect just as I am:
what I am is
enough.
Thirst
The sun was hotter:
You can tell.
Look at the people squinting against it in photos then.
Everything washed out by glare:
Faces, thoughts, nuance,
all detail surrendered.
We could be anybody.
The backyards are parched,
Look at them.
It hurt to walk on the grass.
We lay in barren backyards
chain-smoking and eating fluorescent cheesies,
swilling scarlet soda.
We slathered butter on our chests.
Everyone was burned raw.
Everyone looked happy.
Nothing could go wrong.
Caution was ahead of us,
Men were above us,
landing on the moon.
The everyday extraordinary
Abounds.
As it ever did.
Biding its time until we stop,
Until we notice.
The tiny unheralded jewels nested within our daily lives
That we rushed past, cavalier,
Oblivious.
With no time for the smaller movement,
The goal-less.
We were hell bent on destinations.
Headed to the best seller, the top ten.
There were judgments to render, texts to send.
None of which we remembered
Five minutes after.
Now,
Pause to discover
It is not only the peony in delicious full bloom
That deserves our attention.
Bend down and inspect the tightly wrapped, sleeping bud
Just as it is,
Soon to swarm with the manic aphids that will allow it to be
All it can be.
Watch the dog watching the squirrel.
How the clouds above change shape even as we look away.
The sad supermarket cashier who will remember your smile.
It’s not the goal, it’s the journey.
Once trite, now wise.
Did you know Margaret Atwood also wrote poetry?
The sun was hotter.
You can tell.
Look at us squinting against it in photos then.
Everything washed out by the glare,
cheekbones, jawlines,
all detail surrendered.
Dazzled,
we could be anybody.
The gardens, look,
they’re parched.
It hurt to walk on the grass.
We lay in scorched backyards
slathering butter on our chests,
chain-smoking, eating fluorescent cheesies,
swilling bright red soda.
Everyone burned raw.
Everyone looked deliriously happy.
We knew
nothing could go wrong.
Our lives lay ahead of us.
Men were above us,
landing on the moon.
(goodreads.com contest winner).
September #1
Obligatory backpacks bought,
duo-tangs and the cornucopia of Sharpies,
heralding the dull march back to classrooms, schedules.
In this forlorn wake a trail of
unhurried pancake breakfasts,
scrabble games that last for hours
and lying perfectly still on the sun-scorched dock,
until perhaps trailing a finger,
but only one.
September #2
Boats pulled out for the season
children rushing to school
and like a switch was flipped overnight
the water in the bay now darker
somehow
deeper
Undercover
Late August
slyly
slowly
the light becomes a
miser.
Compulsory
The school uniform, penance.
The wool knee socks even in summer.
The black serge tunics
shiny, slick, crisp, from too many hot irons.
Warmer
The geese now heading south
emit unearthly,
unsettling sounds overhead, clearly the desperate pleas
of those who seek release.
The Galleons
Because I am reading Frank O’Hara
while sitting on a bench at the Brooklyn Promenade
I am aware it is 10:30 in New York
on a Tuesday morning
the way O’Hara was always aware
of what day and hour and season were in front of him
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
he wrote almost sixty years ago on a July moment
that must have been like the one I am having now
the summer hour blossoming
at the promenades by the rivers and in the parks
and in the quiet aisles of the city
when everyone who should be at work
is at work and the trees are meditating
on how muggy it will be today
and the fleets of strollers are out in the sunshine
expanse of the morning
the strollers that are like galleons
carrying their beautiful gold cargo
being pushed by women whose names once graced
the actual galleons Rosario
Margarita Magdalena along with other names
Essie Maja from places that history has patronized
like O’Hara going into the bank
for money or the bookstore to buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what
the poets / in Ghana are doing these days
or the liquor store for liquor
or the tobacconist for tobacco
and sitting at the Brooklyn Promenade I haven’t looked
at the news to see who now has died
though my fingers keep touching the phone’s face
to find out that when it is 10:30 in the morning
in New York it is 11:30 in the night
in Manila and it is 4:30 in the afternoon in Lagos
and in Warsaw and it is 9:30
in the morning in Guatemala City
where it is also Tuesday and where it is also summer.
— Rick Barot
First job. In tight black shorts
and a white bowling shirt, red lipstick
and bouncing ponytail, I present
each overflowing tray as if it were a banquet.
I’m sixteen and college-bound;
this job’s temporary as the summer sun,
but right now it’s the boundaries of my life.
After the first few nights of mixed orders
and missing cars, the work goes easily.
I take out the silver trays and hook them to the windows,
inhale the mingled smells of seared meat patties,
salty ketchup, rich sweet malteds.
The lure of grease drifts through the thick night air.
And it’s always summer at Patty’s Charcoal Drive-In—
carloads of blonde-and-tan girls
pull up next to red convertibles,
boys in black tee shirts and slick hair.
Everyone knows what they want.
And I wait on them, hoping for tips,
loose pieces of silver
flung carelessly as the stars.
Doo-wop music streams from the jukebox,
and each night repeats itself,
faithful as a steady date.
Towards 10 p.m., traffic dwindles.
We police the lot, pick up wrappers.
The dark pours down, sticky as Coke,
but the light from the kitchen
gleams like a beacon.
A breeze comes up, chasing papers
in the far corners of the darkened lot,
as if suddenly a cold wind had started to blow
straight at me from the future—
I read that in a Doris Lessing book—
but right now, purse fat with tips,
the moon sitting like a cheeseburger
on a flat black grill, this is enough.
Your order please.
Barbara Crooker
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.[…]
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum
More info…
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Thanks for sharing