At White River Roadhouse in the Yukon
A bell rings in the late night:
A lone car on the Alaska highway

Like a busy street scene
Reflected in a butcher’s window:
Trimmed head of a large pig

From Vienna it’s picture-postcard all the way.
Tell me, was ever such a land at ease!
The fat farms glistening, the polished pigs.

The river icy in the wind.
Jersey glinting from night’s amalgam. Neon shines
from the luminous, frosted window.

A Narrator will read the numbers and text aloud starting with this statement:

1. Three spotlighted women stand stage center on an otherwise dark stage. Two of them elegantly dressed in black, the third naked. All are white-haired, in their fifties or older.

. . . and the curtain rose in that theatre so long ago
and the music is playing
the first song I fell in

How strange to see their faces start to worry
Into ours, and after all those years
We spent pretending we had made a life

To take advantage of the January thaw, I walk
uptown to savor the grapefruits and green
peppers in the winter light, then, returning, turn

In the ninth grade I met a fantastic number of times
with Cookie Harris in the woods . . . Under the pretense
of going over our Algebra notes, given the pressure

Each evening now the ash blue flame
swept from my fingertips
climbing its gas ladder up the flue