A girl slips out of her uniform, her strict household, and the quiet of her parents, and runs into the city with her russet dog. Montreal's streets, hills and river become her freedom. The poem names Westmount, Sainte-Catherine, Sherbrooke and Mount Royal, and she stores them as mental maps. The parenthetical line, "She is not she if she holds still," sums her up: she only feels like herself when she is moving.
Later, as a woman in a warmer town, she walks with a different dog and finds herself retracing those old routes beside the "ghosts of girl and dog." What she remembers is not French lessons but ships drifting on the river, the calm companionship of the dog, snow, and the smell of other people's suppers. The mood is tender, nostalgic and a little wistful. The ending, with its short, scattered lines about love, black birds and city smoke, feels like a breath of pure sensation, as if wandering itself were the point.