Robyn Sarah lives in Montreal. She has published six poetry books and two collections of short stories in Canada. Her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in The Threepenny Review, New England Review, North American Review, Matrix, The Malahat Review and elsewhere.

Letter in Reply to Linda's from Yangshuo                          Montreal, April 23 On the vestibule mat, your wet letter invoking spring green in Yangshuo, apple branches white with blossoms: It may as well be in Chinese arriving, as it does, in a spring blizzard - wind whirling sleet-stinging snow to plaster the coats of walkers, festooning our own trees in a white too cold for fragrance. - Only a day later, we sweep wet drifts off the balconies, watch metal steam dry under a warm sun. And sit outside in our shirtsleeves in a white world, falling water chiming all around! Keep the Lilacs Blooming Keep the lilacs blooming on the east side, and so on: people in their nightclothes sharing the misery, people nudging people to conundrums like these on the east side, about as wide as the front yard. . . No eggs get broken in front of that little bit of street. Consider me a friend of the city. The Buddha is smiling. Another Interval Woke to a dark kind of revelation aglisten with breeze: no go-ahead for now, no direction - rain all night and now old fragments of picnic painted midnight blue with silver trim, the pock-pock-pock of that game beautiful young men play, down by the water Don't make yourself sad. What a waste of good cinematography - a mosquito in the room, then a thunderstorm, he said Do you mind if I do? and I said Not at all. So things feel that tiny bit less vague, walled in by a gray board fence just after dusk, watching a succession of things pulled out of a hat Social evenings, connected by the idea of pilgrimage (part dream, part myth), telephone messages shaped by my gesture - grasping each carpeted stair, holding forth on a streetcorner to nobody at all - yet nobody blows the whistle, you could spend a life worse ways There was sunlight, hard and bright, a dry sadness on the way home cutting a small caper on the wagon of unresolved anger. . .the dream floating by like a giant fish, a great distance from the enigmatic transitory externals of a moment among the greenery Then, applause in bursts, but as if under water. Evening the colour of Chinese lacquer. I refuse to shut the window.