26 May Claresholm, By Kailee Owen
There’s somebody in a sheer white gown
Sitting in a wood- panelled parlor,
Off the 2 on the 7,
Sipping English breakfast tea and waiting for a warning.
Waiting for a waltz or a foxtrot
By the cinematic lights of a rundown gas station,
Where the red and white dirty Petro-Can glows,
A reminder of the old playground
Out back by the woods with antler branches.
And Sally’s been waiting for her backing track to kick in
As she pulls into town on a Greyhound,
Two loonies and the wrapper of a Kit-Kat bar loose in her pocket.
She’s been gone a long while now, with no imports to show.
She drives past the abandoned hockey rink
Where there’s a strung-out man,
Sitting on a rickety mahogany chair—
Like the one he stole from Leonard Cohen in ‘84—
on a temporary stadium stage,
Waiting for the interview with God to be over
And for the real show to begin.
The candles that light him, he stole from Don McLean,
Who stole them from the devil,
Who stole them from his old friend Jack.
Call it plagiarism or a train robbery,
But he’s just waiting for the Stones to bury him
In a grave with no obituary.
And Sally’s been tryin’ real hard to reconcile
The cannons downtown and wooden spikes on 9th
With lanky stone giants and battleships sinking in dead yellow grass.
But it gets hard to sever yourself from a place,
When you were knighted at the steps of the local church,
And saw St. Michael in the eyes of a white-tailed buck.
She’s weathered the tempest from a crow’s nest,
The Parrish’s name on the side of it already chipping away.
But the museum recognizes her.
It knows the Dutch-Hutterite dirt under her fingernails,
Where they orphaned car radios.
Through all this, I remember napping in the backseat of a Ford,
Next to the car wash that hasn’t left the family in three generations
And hasn’t seen a real customer in two.
When cars passed by in the blue-green twilight,
Their headlights reflecting off the rearview mirror
Looked like broken clocks and imported tequila
(Maybe that’s got something to do
With why Sally and me
Are both scared of cities bigger than ourselves).
And maybe the waltz has begun,
In the wood-panelled parlor,
In the middle of nowhere,
Off the 2 on the 7.
And maybe there’s no music
‘Cause the jukebox is broken and too expensive to fix.
Maybe all that’s left
Are matching footsteps and the sound of canola growing,
Under the red-white lights of the Petro-Can.
And maybe Sally’s pockets are empty
Because she’s not coming home.
And from the back of a Ford,
I’ll watch that Greyhound pass me right on by,
As she drives away from the best sunsets she’ll ever see,
In search of something bigger than a Petro-Can town,
Off the 2, on the 7.