Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough

Author:Kaie Kellough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Véhicule Press

My hotel room in Kingston, Ontario, overlooked Lake Ontario. In one direction, the lake widened toward the horizon. In the other, it narrowed into the Saint Lawrence river, which flowed toward Montréal. I had the night off, and was sitting in a bathrobe staring out to the dock and the lake, to a few boats in the distance, and to some small human figures walking by the waterside. The entire hotel, even the city, floated atop Lake Ontario, and I liked that sense of being adrift in the night with the stars in the distance. Was this how Stompin’ Tom felt when he was alone on the prairies, traveling from one bar show in Red Deer to another in Moose Jaw? Was this what those rural blues musicians felt as they migrated north to Chicago? That sense of drift is why I like extended forms, because drift can’t be contained in a three-minute song.

Stompin’ Tom decided to contain his entire career within Canada. Perhaps this is his folk inheritance as well, because the music loses its immediate references the farther it travels. What of Sonny Boy Williamson in London, Mahalia Jackson or Memphis Slim in Paris? Stompin’ Tom’s focus was the national and the local, and that’s admirable, but it’s impossible to duplicate. I am pulled in too many directions. Sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled apart. That’s why I like Kingston, this little strained junction between Canada and Québec. It feels like the most ambivalent place in Canada because it is right on the lake, which becomes the Fleuve St-Laurent, which flows northeastward, past Montréal and out to the Atlantic, and then it spreads and deepens into the wider world. Lying there, adrift on my hotel bed, I felt I could fall asleep to the rocking of Lake Ontario, which is really the Saint Lawrence, which is really the Atlantic Ocean, which is really the world, which is what I am always attuned to, which is what I heard in the album that I had on repeat, Charles Mingus’s Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, with the sounds of birds and insects mingling among the Latin rhythms. Mingus’s bass, whose notes can drop with such density and weight, solidifies the undertone, and gives the work a groaning, oceanic rock.

I was adrift. I could wake up somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps at the bottom of the ocean, walking barefoot along the ocean floor playing my saxophone, never having to remove my mouth from the reed to take a breath, just constantly blowing. As I blew and worked the keys, the groaning of the ocean changed its pitch, and an endless supply of air escaped my horn and ascended to the surface in a column, a vast bubbling column that parted the water. As the water parted, the skeletons of those who made the middle passage but who were thrown overboard, the cargo that died in the hold, or that fell ill yet survived in a fevered limbo,

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