Duped by the moon
a woman walks into snow and knows
at once what she once was.
Feathers return to the hollow
above her shoulder blades,
gravity swoops from the earth
into the sky
and she soars upward
head turning like an owl’s,
eyes big enough to see a vole
sleeping in it’s soft
sarcophagus of snow;
when she swerves
to look at what’s behind
she glimpses
through the farmhouse window
her daughter, her white-haired
husband and the old
amnesiac who is her father
dumbly waiting at the table
she had set,
their empty plates
shining from this height
as if the moon itself
had been sliced like a winter turnip
and could serve no better purpose
than to hold what they would eat.
~ from The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)
