URBAN SCENE

It's not just squirrels and seagulls
or rats winged and rodent:

1.

some cold January evening
walking home along Ste. Famille
snow drifts piled high on the curbs

and scuttling between the parked cars
emerges a ball of fur
striped black and grey

a raccoon

stares up at us
through its black mask
for a moment
with its green glowing nocturnal eyes

you try to make friends with it
but it just scurries
chittering chattering
away

2.

a friend of mine tells me
about taking the bus to Quebec City
crossing the bridge and getting on the highway
and she sees
just sitting there on a pole alongside the road
a snowy owl

there among the shabby South Shore houses
sitting in a grumbling growling bus on a 4 lane highway

she sees a snowy owl

3.

swirling above
the Place-des-Arts complex
in the big blue sky puffed up with cumulus clouds
two circling shapes
swing close

two hawks

two hawks riding the updrafts
over downtown Montreal circling
close and visible for a few moments
then higher and higher
until they're just
tiny specks
in the
blue

PARC LAFONTAINE

1

on the city mad it's only a square of green
two-thumbnails-put-together
framed by streets -- Rue Sherbrooke, Avenue du Parc Lafontaine,
Rachel, Papineau. --
surrounded by houses, highrises, hospital, public library, a school, offices

a) one time I remember there were a bunch of gay men beat up in the park & everyone started speculating that there was a serial-gay-killer on the loose...

2.

There are two ponds, kept in line by concrete walls,
& one of them contains a fountain
which
in winter is boarded up with plywood
the ponds drained to a shallow brown slick
When the water freezes, they set benches & potted cedar trees on the ice
& rent out skates

b) one time there's this guy sometime 'round midnight standing at the water's edge coolly playing alto saxophone for no one but himself...

3.

There's the UQAM building the STCUM building
playground equipment
a baseball diamond
an outdoor theatre which has always looked decrepit & long unused but maybe
that's because I've never seen it in summer on the far eastern side
of the park there are these massive, ancient poplar trees that you can't
even wrap your arms halfway around

c) one time this man at least fifteen years my senior singles me out & tries to pick me up & we have this strange conversation all in French & he keeps asking me Vous comprennez? Vous comprennez ... ? like he doesn't believe I understand him

4.

At night it's a true dark
-- a slick of darkness within the city's lights --
car lights, streetlights invade
sluicing across the black water of the ponds & the trees
black and finger-like
poking at the sky, rattling in the wind
some unnameable unwriteable emotion fills me to the hilt and is so definitely
distinctly divinely not something I get from the rest of the city

d) one time a friend tells me how she & this guy drove through the park in his car at like three in the morning & it was like such a blast...

5.

In the depths of winter it is, for a change, sparsely populated blankets of snow bury the benches, the trees- trees black & naked unless they haven't taken down the Christmas lights yet...

always different,

always the same