Cate Marvin
Issue 13 • April 2014
Some nights when the dusk is done hurting
the glass-shards shaken out onto the street,
has finished stirring the empties’ smashed
embers up with late light into fits of glint, I try
a little harder to remember. In the same
manner smoke alarms alert us to their
weariness by emitting a meagering succession
of beeps, you’ll try my memory while I sit
back on my couch with a drink; feel for me what
it was to drop my eyes out a plane’s porthole
into the maw I saw below: an ice-island lying flat
beneath, clouds layered between it and me,
an elderly lady in the seat beside me snoring
in Chinese, our craft short-cutting its way to
Hong Kong over the Arctic Circle. Understand,
I never expected my eyes to land on that land
on which your eyes flew from out your skull.
And that fortune teller I dismissed, who said she
could hear two boys knocking on our cloud
door, anxiously waiting to be born unto us.
Weeping into the cup of myself on the subway:
the kindest look handed down by a stranger!
A portrait in a porthole closes with one eye.
Remembering your hand suspending a jewel
of cheap wine shining garnet in a jelly glass.