1. Not until the sun goes down. Not even as early as dust motes. Not rainfall or cellulite or oil in the river. Not branches swaying like they do in a storm. Not Hercules or Orion. Not stars or satellites.

 2. As far as I know, it’s Wednesday. The way she looks at you when you use a hammer. All soft and preening. A song floats up from the basement radio. A bright blue flame. I would take you to Paris, I would take you to New York, I would take you to the moon. If treetops. If moonlight and nonchalance.

 3. I’ve been swinging from chandeliers. Anything to not have to stand bare on the concrete in the middle of a crowd. Catch me, I’m falling. Over by the lamp post: a lonely man with a tin cup in his hand asking strangers for spare change. Over by the bus stop, a woman with her winter coat coming loose at the seams. I’ve been waiting my whole life to get here and this is all we get.

 4. That morning there was light cupped in the maple leaves. Oh, liquid, oh, mourning. Tell it to the postman. Tell it to the grocery store clerk. I’m alive though I once was nearly dead. I ran a hundred miles to be here. I dug long and hard in the ground with a garden spade. Was there anything else I could have done?

 5. What happens when you sit there? Does the ground open and swallow you whole? Does a wind come and sweep you away? Does the pale light in the room split you open? No. Stay where you are.

 6. Open it. Turn it on its creaky hinges. There. That’s called being alive. That’s called a roaring ocean. That’s called getting in the boat and sailing toward the horizon. Land is emptiness and emptiness is land. Away you go anyway.

 7. Even with a toothache. Even in a hurricane. Even in a smallish tornado. Even on Sundays and Mondays. Even on a rollercoaster a ferris wheel a train. Even in California or at the bottom of a well. In deep shadows.

 8. The cherry blossoms done now. Nothing here but dust motes and the smell of rain. There is nothing, there is everything, the world is empty and full.

 9. The magnolia out the window is preening in the sun. And summer comes on too fast. Who wants winter? I do. I want the darkness to teach me how to love it.

 10. An ode to uncertainty. An ode to the ground falling out beneath you. An ode to watching things alter and depart. If treetops. If nightfall. An ode to swinging from a chandelier. An ode to lonely men with tin cups and dreary bus stops and torn winter coats.

Poetry Reading: Instructions For Waking Up

I've Got My Eye on You

Sunday

Calgary

I have always loved the recording of this song. I love the way you can hear the pedal being pressed and released. I love the way you can hear the hammers inside the piano hitting softly, and a slight echo in the small room. 

This song used to be called "Happy" but my good friend Andrew Smith, a notable songwriter himself, said: That's the saddest happy song I've ever heard." 

This song never made it onto an album. The music label I'd recorded it with fell through, and I could never reconcile the complicated feeling in this song, so it was never re-recorded for any project. 

Sometimes we write songs because a song can feel simpler, more manageable than real life does. 

A few years later, I would leave my terrible marriage. 
I would leave the city that made me feel like I was suffocating - too similar to the city of my childhood, too devoid of wild spaces where  I could go to feel connected to the earth.

But when I wrote this song, I was only feeling winter and the broken furnace and the edgy desperation of being at home with my small children and some deep emptiness I was not yet brave enough to name.

Special thanks to Danny McBride and Adam Wittke for the lovely production.

Third night of cold and I can't get warm
The furnace guy comes tomorrow
And every time someone opens the door
Oh, the wind blows in through the house, through the house

I imagine these four walls shaking
Pleading for warmth and springtime
I step outside, get another log for the fire
Before it fades and dies

And night comes too early now
Long before you get home
So we wait while the flames get bright
We're happy, oh we're happy, we're happy 

Don't have a quarter for parking
Yesterday I cut my own hair
But that's all gonna change some day, darling
You just wait and see, wait and see, there there

Meanwhile the frost creeps up the glass
And there's nothing to do but watch the hours pass
You slip your fingers slowing into mine
Oh, the cold can't get through
No, that would never do

Winter Song

Parachute

In the summer of 2017, Ursula's parents asked me if, when the time came, I would sing a song at Ursula's funeral. This song floated up one afternoon when I was thinking of Ursula after she got sick again. I was looking out the window at the Foxglove blooming along the edges of the yard. 

Ursula lived through that summer and the next one, surrounded by friends and family, dressed in a princess dress and a crown whenever I saw her. The day we buried her, it was raining. It was the first hard rain after a long, exquisite summer. A large group of us walked together, with the family, from the ball park to the cemetery, under umbrellas of many colours. We were all told to wear bright clothing, and with the umbrellas, we looked more like a circus parade than a community headed out to help a family bury a child. 

I sang this song against the roar of the rain, but because the lyrics were not easily heard, I wanted to record it and post it here for the family. 

Dedicated to the Joy family, with love.

Ode to Ursie

November Trees

Oh, you want to hold late December
And not let it get away
Everything has been moving too fast here
Even the trees look frayed

Something tangled around you 
Back when the summer sky was aflame
You got lost in that light. You thought
It was meant to stay

Everything is a circle
That’s what she told you then
You dream full moons and carousels 
When the light gets thin

Where have you been gone?
Where have you been gone so long

Something  loosened around you
after you left that place
Tiny cracks where the light pours in
And across your face
And across your face

Where Have You Been Gone

Windows							

It is winter in the prairies
Drifts of snow across the lawn
I am thinking of the summer
When we walked on Corydon

Did we stumble, did we falter?
Did we never learn the way?
It is snowing, it is blowing. 
I could never make you stay

Oh, and do you, do you remember?
How the garden bloomed that June?
And we opened all the windows
And the summer wind came through?

Was it winter that took over?
Did my heart just close up tight
Like the windows of that winter
Frozen up against the night?

Hey hey hey. . .

It is raining and I miss you
It is April by the sea
I have spent all of my dollars 
Still this ache, it follows me

I am lonely now for summer
I am lonely for the wind
That blew in through open windows
Will it ever come again? Will it ever come again?

Did we stumble, did we falter?
Did we never learn the way?
I did not know how to stay

Windows

Kim June Johnson is a Canadian singer-songwriter and poet. Her live shows combine song, storytelling and poetry and are often performed in living rooms and small, intimate settings. Her new single, November Trees, was released this past November. 


Critics have long praised her moving, angelic vocals and her craftsmanship as a songwriter. Written with a maturity and wisdom that calls to mind the classic works of Vashti Bunyan, Carol King and KD Lang, her songs are universal and timeless and sung with an intimacy and openness that are unmistakably her own.

Kim has been recognized by the USA Songwriting Competition and the International Songwriting Competition for several of her compositions, including Calgary and Parachute from her album Paper Sun. She has shared the stage with Chic Gamine, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, Shari Ulrich, the Marc Atkinson Trio, Little Miss Higgins and Colin Linden.

Canvas & Clay was produced by Marc Atkinson (The Bills). It is Kim’s most pop-oriented record to date and features guest appearances by Daniel Lapp on trumpet and fiddle and Scott White on upright bass.

She calls Hornby Island home.

Kim June Johnson

Popular tracks