Leaves take a seat

The show can begin. A matinée. I play the lead. I can play anyone. Just ask a poem. And I do.

ACT I

SCENE 1

Enter I. Carrying a camera. Stops to look down at a dead junco on the deck beneath the kitchen window. Black and white, head covered in leaves, its feet curled around the inevitable.

I: Take its picture.

I: Forget it.

[Exeunt.]

Yesterday ends up today

I had to get dressed to answer the door. It was just the neighbour kid ringing doorbells as her mother led her down the hall. A day so ordinary, full of this and that, ends up taking up a good half page of someone's notebook, usually my own. Bought a thera-band, tied my left leg to a table and pulled toward the wall. Went to see my daughter's play and found myself in the spotlight next to her during one of her entries when she, playing Alice, chats with an audience member. ("I'll remember that for a long time," she told me later. I said I would too.) Watched the beginning of the one film Charles Laughton directed, which begins with pastoral New England autumn images (in black and white) zooming slowly to a dead body found inside a shed. Found a stump in the easement behind Monroe. That's where to find things, I guess: behind, inside, at the edge of, pulling someone's leg (usually my own).

Yesterday my friends bought a house

It ended up in my dreams. I was sitting on the floor beneath the window, lost in the icing of a Nanaimo bar from the Tall Grass Prairie Bakery, when the knock came. We all looked at each other. No one moved. The door swung open on its own accord. There stood a letter carrier basked in light, holding a large envelope. Is there a Brenda Schmidt here, he asked. I stopped chewing. We all looked at each other again. Of course there is, he said, answering the silence. She makes everything about her.

Later I walked the easement, hoping my knee wouldn't act up

The two high school boys who pulled their faded red Datsun in behind me on Newlands this morning weren't in any hurry to get to school. They talked non-stop, laughing frequently as they opened the trunk, fiddled with their backpacks, sipped their Tim Hortons beverage. They took turns waiting for each other. I'd engaged in similar talk/laugh display myself, back when I was a teen-aged boy and my best buddies and I shared a language only we could love or even understand.

That much I observed through my rear-view window. I rolled the window down a crack, hoping to hear some specifics. I heard a dog bark, a garbage truck drive by. The morning itself sounded drizzly, raw.

I've been here before, I thought. A morning like this, a boy like this. A block and a half from where I used to live.