Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Winter Museum” by Anthony Purdy, part of the League’s Fresh Voices program.

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Winter Museum

By Anthony Purdy

It appeared last winter
before the freeze.
A package of tawny hide
delivered to the side of the road,
trailing a fragile filigree of legs
criss-crossed unnaturally
at angles that made us wince.

We filed past it every day,
crossing to the other side
to steer the dogs away.

December came… and went.
The package shrank.
Bone resorbed flesh.

From one day to the next
it shuffled back and forth,
scraping out its danse macabre;
then, one bitter morning,
swept
clear across the road
with broken legs and fading charms,
a bare-boned skeleton
quick-quick-slowing
toward the ditch where,
under shrouds of snow,
it did the decent thing
and disappeared.

A month passed
before the winds
of early spring
unveiled it.

Framed under thick ice
the young deer lay
and would there remain,
exposed in its open-air vitrine
till April washed it clean.

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Copyright © Anthony Purdy

Anthony Purdy (he/him) is an East Coast poet and writer of short fiction. He has worked in the steel industry, grown tulips in France, taught Beowulf in Germany, delivered mail and milk. He has been an actor, a translator and an interpreter, worked with refugees in Paris and genocide survivors in Ontario. A chapbook, No Sound is Dissonant, was published in October 2024 with the Little Books Collective of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Fresh Voices is a publication and workshop program created by and for the League’s associate members, curated and edited by Erin Vance.

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