He remembers the darkness of winter
mornings when he was 15 and helped
the milkman deliver milk door to door.
The wagon was drawn by a horse, clippity

cloppity, the only sound, and the milkman
humming under his breath while the boy
he was would run up to each house, a bottle
of milk in his hand, the glass slick with cold,

the wagon waiting, the horse stomping.
That was 1954, and before
the milkman bought his first truck; before
his family’s move away from Montreal,

that city still luminous in his mind,
as if rising again newly polished,
the copper dome of St. Joseph’s Cathedral,
in a sky blanched by snow and lost time.