The
world's
a dark
theater
tonight, its curtains
of clouds drawn back to reveal a
wide-screen, panoramic shot of a starry sky
above a leafless tree-line, for which we can
imagine what the musical soundtrack
must be: maybe something moody and atmospheric,
maybe even ominous and full of menace, or,
to our surprise, just a couple
of cows bellowing out to each other, back and forth,
from different dark points across the
valley, or lone farm dog out patrolling the woods this
evening, whereupon our story
requires that the first
plot point show
itself
now
with
the
dog
finding the
corpse of a census-
taker who's been missing for months.
