If there are any heavens
my mother will all by herself
have one.
It will not be a pansy heaven
nor a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley.
It will be a heaven of robust yellow roses,
with thick notched stems
not prone to bending.
The blooms will be embarrassingly,
sinfully fragrant, the size of
baseballs when fully blazing.
They’ll radiate light in their yellowness and
they’ll never die.
~~ Tricia McCallum
How wrong we can be about the things we think will save us…
I walked behind them on the way home
after the usual Saturday night skating at the small town’s arena.
He was the high school all-star,
she the ice ballerina.
She wore pink angora mittens, and a matching beret
perched at what seemed the perfect angle on her small head,
her white-blond hair cascading down.
She was so small he towered beside her as they walked,
He strode, she with tiny quick mincing steps to keep up,
her little furry hand buried inside his enormous one.
She looked up at him often and longingly.
He looked straight ahead and did most of the talking,
I couldn’t imagine, that bitter February night,
the idea of happiness being anywhere but right there,
in front of me,
she at his side,
with a rightful place,
and a way for her to be in this world.
At 15,
it seemed all I needed was there,
in that matching set of pink woolens
and in a tall young man walking beside me
who could have been anywhere,
anywhere at all that he wanted,
but had chosen here,
with me.
~Tricia McCallum
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
There she remains,
In the folds of her nightgown
Tucked deeply in her bedside drawer,
Releasing the scent of her Chantilly.
And here, in her treasured clip-on earrings
Of aurora borealis rhinestones,
All the colors of the northern lights,
She explained.
And perhaps most,
Up there on the closet shelf,
Her well-worn sewing basket,
A frayed tapestry on its lid of
A young woman’s gentle face.
There, inside, among the bobbins of thread,
Mother’s tarnished metal thimble,
Its tiny nubs worn smooth from use.
Remembering how whenever she mended,
I would hear her sigh deeply
As the thimble’s cap clicked
Against her flying needle,
Her impatience palpable,
So desperate was she to be done.
Knowing now it reminded her of
Being pulled from school at the age of nine,
Pressed into piecework for a gruff Glasgow furrier,
Stitching together heavy coats in dingy rooms
From piles of animal pelts,
Never to return to school,
Or childhood,
Again.
~~ Tricia McCallum
No Heart
I don’t have the heart
for the news that demands
daily
a suspension of disbelief,
a numbing disconnection
that I am no longer willing to offer up.
Today, a tsunami rising
suddenly
on some faraway ocean.
Tonight, children herded into unmarked vans.
Tomorrow, the Yulan Dog Massacre.
Just give me robot dogs,
microchipped to respond.
To jump up on your bed via remote command,
even rest their heads on your pillow alongside.
And if one’s tiny titanium paw should trod on a nail,
there will be no pain.
None at all.
Only an error message
flashing in electric pink neon,
reminding us to pay attention.
To listen up here:
Something needs fixed.
~~ Tricia McCallum
Someone asked me recently if I ever prayed. It prompted this…
Ways to Pray
There are a million ways to pray.
Not one of has anything to do with an oak pew
Or a frocked man prompting from a pulpit on high.
Nothing special is needed.
No preparation or special equipment.
The quiet is no prerequisite.
Not solemnity
Nor a bowed head.
A seat on a New York subway will do.
A carnival ride at full tilt.
Or the middle of nowhere, so still
Your breath is its accompaniment.
We think more must be required, so we hesitate.
We edit.
We borrow from scripts of parchment.
But like so much
The opposite is true.
A prayer’s success lies in it being
Entirely and unapologetically
Your own,
Unshackled by dogma,
The counting down of rosary beads,
The mouthing of others’ perceptions.
Be anywhere.
Think of what matters.
Start with the words I wish.
Consider I hope.
End with I tried.
~~ Tricia McCallum
What is it in me
What is it in me
that needs to tell you this?
Never More.
It will never be more summer than this.
This moment.
Every petal and bough, every bloom at its most beautiful
in hue, texture, depth of colour.
Nature at her most potent.
She shows off.
Tomorrow begins the sad inevitable decline,
Her gradual descent toward less.
But today,
Oh, today,
Drink it in,
Every last sip.
Such glory cannot possibly last.
A little pixel dust… my nickname for my micro poems…
Screen Tests
I’d run home after the movies
To act out each scene,
Word for word,
With accents and flourishes,
Mom watching in her housedress
At the little yellow kitchen table,
Smoking.
In. Coming.
My druthers would be you
Coming through the door
Soaking wet,
In that fabulous old trench
We bought for a steal,
Brimming over with stories
For tea.
Interloper
And just when I think you’re
Listening
I turn and see you
Enraptured
By the girl in the next booth.
In my writer’s group we had an assignment to set our timers for 10 minutes and write sentences beginning with the letter F. Only the letter F. (Try a list yourself. Choose your own letter.) They’re known as prompts, and they’re credited as indispensable tools to jump start the writing doldrums.
These were my 10 F’s (!) and were I to write another list right this moment, I know it would be utterly different. Therein lies the power of this exercise, to unshackle the writer, wondrously.
Strung together, I quite like the idea of shaping this list of 10 into a poem, and no doubt will.
Katherine Barrett interviews Poet Tricia McCallum
Katherine Barrett is the founder and editor-in-chief of Understorey Magazine, which publishes literary writing and visual art by and about Canadian women. She has also served as Editor with the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and Demeter Press.
KB: You’ve just completed your third collection of poems called Icarus Also Flew. You’ve also published many poems in journals, anthologies and magazines. Can you tell us how you came to poetry?
TM: I was always a huge reader. In fact my greatest regret is that I never found a job that would pay me to read books in air conditioning. It was from a very young age that I started writing down my own stories. And reading them to anyone who would listen.
Later I paid my bills with freelance writing because, as Garrison Keillor said, “Burglary beats poetry when it comes to making money.” But I wrote poems in my off hours, finding homes for them where I could. Creating them is as much a part of me as my red hair or my left-handedness.
Poetry has helped me figure out what I think. About this life of mine, these lives of ours. I don’t think I would have navigated my life half as well without it.
Poetry is my church. It’s where I have found my courage.
KB: Your poems entice through telling details from around the world: tiger balm in Kuala Lumpur, a motel in Cape May, a record shop in Ontario. Does this reflect your personal travelling or work experience? How do you think a keen sense of observation helps to inspire writers?
TM: All those places are ones I have actually been. I did dispense tiger balm to the Cambodian refugees I helped return by the planeload to Canada following Pol Pot. I did in fact stay in a rundown quirky motel in Cape May for a period of time and come to know some of the residents. A boyfriend of my youth, in a very small Canadian town, once took me by the hand into a record store for a birthday surprise. All of these pieces, and so many others of mine, come straight from my experiences. You’ll find a pretty clear map of my life in my writing. Case in point: I wrote one about the trials, nay, horrors, of working as a freelance wedding photographer, which I did for a time to bolster my writing income.
Observation may be the one thing indispensable to a poet. It might all just come down to noticing the details, if not in fact being entranced by them.
My poetry is not really simple, I don’t think, but it is about commonplace things. I’m not an abstract thinker. I’m interested in ordinary life, the so-called mundane details that make up our days. But to me they are not mundane. To me they are rich in possibility, nuance.
To me, they’re magic.
KB: You say your poems are simple but your work does broach complex universal themes, particularly loss, remembrance and celebration of life. What attracts you to these ideas?
TM: The poet Shelly said “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” I could not hope to express it better. Loss, in all its shapes, stages and guises propels so much of what writers create.
I remember someone once asked me, impatiently, “Why don’t you ever write a happy poem?”
Happiness is never fodder for me in this way. When I’m happy I can generally be found out and about, munching on Snickers bars, reading anything and everything within reach, including the Hollywood rags, and wasting inordinate amounts of time, deliciously.
KB: Two of your poems in your second book The Music of Leaving have won the Goodreads.com Poetry Contest. And you won the contest for a third time with your poem “The Things I Learned as a Bartender.” Can you tell us about that process? How does winning a contest influence a writer’s career?
TM: My three wins in goodreads.com poetry competitions have been amazing kick starters for my writing and offered incredible exposure. It was thrilling to win each time and so heartening, because the winning compositions are ultimately voted for online by goodreads members themselves from among a group of five finalists chosen by a panel of judges, all fine poets themselves.
All of this puts me in illustrious company. This contest attracts amazingly gifted writers.
It was in a bio of Lisa Genova’s, the author of the novel Still Alice, where I first learned about the power of goodreads.com, its astounding reach and potential for writers. Genova self-published that book, after being unable to find a publisher for it, astounding, I know, and she used goodreads as one of the ways she promoted it. It ended up a bestseller, of course, and then a brilliant movie.
KB: How will you celebrate Poetry Month come April?
TM: With very good Scotch. (Actually, tea, but Scotch sounds so much more … literary.)
That, and setting myself the challenge of writing a new poem every day in April, even if it’s only a raw draft. I scribble a new idea down in one go and hope that it eventually morphs into something worthwhile.
Oh, and checking my Inbox with my first coffee alongside for poems that come to me from all over. I can’t imagine a better start to a day. The coffee sharing equally stellar status…
For the Robot
to write a poem
first
it must survive a kindergarten schoolyard trauma, a sunburn on an overcast day,
bury, in a small paper box that once held a bar of soap,
the thumbnail-sized frog that was once a polliwog it caught at Mrs. Anderson’s
pond whose tail fell off and hind legs emerged like quotation marks & had
been kept in the rinsed Best Foods mayonnaise jar
must worry a tobacco-stained grandfather’s hand
run over a jackrabbit on I-40 in the Arizona desert
get divorced
burn dinner
confess its sins
suffer food poisoning
refuse to eat blue M & M’s
hang, on a sweet-breezy July, laundry in Fishtail, Montana—eye the distant Sawtooth
Mountains & hum “Waltzing Matilda” which it learned from Miss Vineyard
in second grade
must fear thunder
rush to focus its binoculars on the wintering Lazuli Bunting
tell white lies to be kind
shout “Heavens to Betsy!”
be part of a standing ovation
endure recurring nightmares
question the crossing guard about the origin of “fingers crossed”
develop calluses as it learns to play the twelve-string banjo
have its hair smell of campfire smoke
swat, during a humid-summer dusk, at mosquitoes on a dock full of splintered
cypress wood at Half Moon Lake in Eau Claire, Wisconsin
forever dislike Brussels sprouts because it overcooked them and they smelled like
rotten eggs
must watch wind
weep at a funeral
lose anything
imagine infinity
doubt God’s existence
die a little every day
then, perhaps—
~~ Alison Bailey
—from Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge
September 2023, Artist’s Choice
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