A Suit

from Your Name Here (2000)

        The audience was scattered forever, and the story left untold.
	              —from the film Careful, by Guy Maddin
	 
        Maybe it only looks bedraggled.
	Let’s take it up to the fifth floor and see.
	One can look quite far in that light, into the corners
	of experiences we never knew we had, that is to say most of them.
	 
        But the city is new.  The new apartment building, now vacant,
	circles like a moth that as yet has no idea
	it’s trapped in a spider’s web, that the indelible
	will soon come to pass.  For a few moments now
	we can drink tea and talk of the famous doll collection
	in the museum of a small European spa.
	Shadows on the tent alert us: Breathing isn’t going to be as easy
	as we’d thought once.  Mr. Cheeseworth is always so right
	in his calculations, yet when one comes to believe him, where is he?
	 
        It has been a life of qualification and delay.
	Yet we knew we were on the right track; something surged in us,
	telling us otherwise, that we’d arrive too early at the airport
	or something about the drips on the taxi in the dusk.
	We doctored it all up,
	and I think I have an explanation for the manna
	that falls softly as pollen, and tastes like coconut or some other
	unaccountable sherbet.  It seems clothes never do fit.
	 
        Yes, I could have told you that some time ago.