Reinvention (Part 1)

Braving bitter winter
I step outside-- Montreal
in mid-January, fresh
snow on the ground, glistening
from the sun, lofty
in the iced sky.

Noticing tiny paw prints in
otherwise untouched snow,
I know a stray dog has beaten
me to acknowledging
the beauty of a new day,

though cold-- temperature hovering
at half the freezing mark--
I am alive for the time in a while,

soul somehow satiated,
perhaps by the freedom this
place does afford me:
zooming underground on
rubber-wheeled trains,
slowly sipping espresso in
a city quarter that has flourished
for centuries.

But I wonder,
traveling underground now,
that it might just be the
vastness of it all--
being a speck on a city plane
that stretches for miles,
a part of something more
powerful than the atmosphere
I created for myself in Berkshire woods:

I escape from everything,
am nothing
(save an individual cell
in a larger honeycomb)
and yet I can become anything
I want to be, once again

breathing in cold air,
I reinvent myself,
exiting the Metro station
in a residential neighborhood
on the outskirts.

Less imposing buildings greet me,
initial calm as I am an explorer now,
determination to discover (something)
alight in my eyes.

Without any constraints,
I linger on each step, catching
the hurried Quebecois French of
school children before arriving
at a market,
petite and ordinary from outside,
but something else entirely inside:

raw and somehow lived,
individual devotion to owned stalls,
energy felt on skin if not
entirely understood in tongue,

nothing less than sensory bliss
grabbing ripened fruit and brie,
brought in from somewhere far off,
but local to me as I see the wrinkles
and graying hairs on dying cells of a
city on a modern tilt.

I want to linger there forever,
bucking Time and everything else that
keeps me moving forward,
but I can only be an explorer
for so long in a city I will soon leave,

and so I moult the label
I affixed to myself,
teneral in a moment of indecision:
what will I be next? I ask myself,
softly though, realising this to be my
own life, journey I have undertaken
alone, for now at least, and
so I battle this question in my mind
before arriving at an answer:
cinephile.

A simple answer, but an answer
nonetheless.

It takes little time to decide on
Le scaphandre et le papillon.
How I have heard of Jean-Dominique,
fated to stroke and lose control of
everything but the blinking of his eyes,
blink blink, reduction of a mind
to the simplest of physical states,

I weep at the sight in the theatre
I braved an uphill climb on
slippery sidewalks to reach.
I weep, not just to myself,
(though I worry every day of
disintegration)
but for a soul so clearly tormented,
trapped in a diving bell with
the bright lights of fashion still
fresh in memory.

Exiting the theatre and out into
the cold again, I realise
I have wept for something else:
the end of my constant reinvention
looming closer with each passing day.