I turn a corner into the nightclub district and suddenly come upon two gifts. I reach down, take a close look, and scan them for luck. The first is a dark red satin ankle strap; maybe the dancer caught her party shoe on the teeth of a steel grate or a car door in the middle of the night. She must have kept on moving, dancing down the street. The strap is perfectly fresh and new, its tiny brass buckle and one brass tooth still fastened to itself, and for a second the dancer appears before me in the vapours of her happiness, running along the lamp-lit alleyways to another bistro, the strapless shoe like a second skin still holding her foot. The second gift is the curled peel of an orange. Its bright spiral glows on the wet black pavement; oils still bead the leather of its own skin. This reveller was so thirsty he sucked the fruit until its miniature universe was completely gone, and so was he, on to the last bus threading the dark streets to his watchman's job in the halls of the university. Urban hiker on a trek, poet thinking a new poem in her head, I know where I am going to end up, a couple of hours from now, in the back room of my apartment, where I will sit uninterrupted. My desk waits like an unopened letter, it's there like the clean and complex room of a prose poem, a visual and musical text I will sit with, if all goes well, through the long afternoon and into the evening.

I am practising suspension, absorbing everything, distorting my peripheral vision under the influence of the sun-strands of new forsythia streaking the gray hills this early spring morning. I am walking east through the city to my desk, less than three miles from here, though it seems farther, on foot, the terrain dramatically layered with river, cliff, bridges, river. I am the unlikeliest flâneuse in a least likely place, neither broad metropolis nor neat town, but my own beautiful and homely and complicated small American city. The parapets and belvederes of Pittsburgh glint with silver-pink light as far as my gaze ravels into the eastern sky.