The Music of Leaving

By Tricia McCallum

There is a music of leaving, as surely as there is that of arriving. And it is this distinct soulful music that we often hear, however faintly, in the background of our lives. McCallum’s poems are about elephants being traipsed through the Queens Midtown Tunnel, an unstable child’s slide, and roaming island dogs. About a visit to a family home before it is sold, a late night conversation in a plane above an ocean, and shrewd Irish falcons. About eloquent gravestones, da Vinci’s unfinished joke book, the elegant legs of a heron, and landing on the moon. About a jackknife dive at dusk, a young girl’s sleepover, and a memory instantly evoked by brushing against a stand of lavender. McCallum’s hope for her new book The Music of Leaving is that it delivers to her readers those “magical moments of understanding” that a good poem can.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781926452586

Book preview

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: [phone]

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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: Everyone’s Gone to the Moon

Everyone’s Gone to the Moon

Too Late Tomorrow

Past Master

While Visiting a School of Falconry in Ireland

Subject Matters

Through the Porthole

Are You From Around Here

Three Years

Hallmark

The Way to Go

In What World

If This is your Final Destination, Welcome Home

Eulogies

The Gift of Donovan

Perfectly Sad

Sisters

Turn Left at the Lilies

Fraud

Glowing Tribute

Come Back

The Slide

By the Wayside

Part II: Impossible Gardens

Thirst

There’s Always the Guy

Beautiful Dreamer

Too Cold for Snow

The Trouble with Science

Punch and Judy

Why Worry

The Most Expectant Month

The Present

The Care and Share

Empathy

Enough

Points for Trying

The Island Dog

The Sleepover

Words Enough

Of Distant Shores

What Remains

At Rest

Passing Sounds

One Favour

Washed Up

This Instead

Know You Were Here

III: Her Own Blues

Reverence

Jackknife

Rewrites

Parallax

Cathy Was Her Name

None of her Own

Catch Up

Castoffs

How I Lose You

Following Seas

Kiss the Sweetness

Legacy

One of these Gray Days

Be Quiet: You’re Talking

Pentimento

Remember Us

For Keeps

Acknowledgements

I.

Everyone’s 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

Everyone’s Gone to the Moon

Why does it have to be your favourite song playing

Whenever you’re 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

I’d got it all wrong,

I