1.
Iced-over pavement,
every footstep tries to be showy:
to choreograph some unexpected
turn-of-fate for itself, ballet,
to be noticed.
The rest-of-me trying to hold a straight face,
but surprised (surprised!) by the antics
of Left Foot and Right Foot.
2.
The postman doesn't ring twice,
but brings packages for the woman
who lives in the basement suite
at the back of the Margaret Atwood Boarding House
who lives her mail to rot like corpses for days.
3.
The pie was an unexpected footstep
marked by the crinkle of a pie tin--
it is a day of plates and there are plates
in the sink after lunch and pie,
but only one fork.
4.
Leonard Cohen wonders what they meant, you know,
repent, but I'm certainly not going to tell him anything.
5.
There is too much concern with regard to line length.
6.
The expedition is imagined,
only, even with salt
on the front walk; errands
can be pushed back
until tomorrow.
There is a dark already.
7.
The landscape smells like apocalypse,
which smells a bit like rum, sideways,
or mud mixed with snow; the landscape
has grown fresh appendages and paths
made out of footsteps taken (surprise!)
by people who've moved on since then,
whether delivering mail into boxes or
walking on, walking on from home.
8.
They wear dresses embroidered with peonies
wedding-cake flowers iced on 'round their necks
permanent necklaces with dangling virginity
(always, flowers, virgins)
but they stamp their feet in gumboots
while ice decomposes (not melts)
into the parentheses. The camera clicks.
9.
Prospero drowns his books in the sea.
He will regret this, later, five years from now,
scouring secondhand bookshops
with an incomplete list.