Toronto

July, 2005

Getting the check

We don’t travel
like other folks.
We tour the world,
from one Chinatown
to the next.

Today, we’re upstairs
in a dim sum joint in Toronto,
eating the parts of animals
no one else will eat.
Trolleys rumble
in the street below.

The corner of Dundas and Spadina,
once the Glasgow of the New World,
is a Hong Kong so crowded,
sometimes you are forced to stop
and let life stream around you.

From the restaurant window,
I can see the world’s tallest
freestanding structure,
eighteen hundred fifteen feet
of poured concrete
rising above the squalor.

We ask for our check.
There is nothing left
on the table before us,
but empty plates
and piles of bones.