Montreal Before Spring

Telephone wires, dark as a line in a schoolboy's notebook against the dawn; paint flakes from houses drifting down like dust; the hulking shadow of a desk that emerges, stock-still as a cow, in the moment of waking. Join poet Robert Melançon for a quiet celebration of his city, its inhabitants, and the language that gives it life.

You go forth, drunk on
the multitudes, drunk
on everything, while
the lampposts sprinkle
nodding streets with stars.