Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

Today the pane-frost
is a map
of a lung
exhumed from a cold chest
by the coroner.

I can see through it
to the year's first snow.
Hefty flakes
hesitate
to finish
falling,
ride anxious whims
up, over, around.

Across the street
from our house
a woman falls.

A man holds out
his hand to her.
He is offering assistance
or asking for change.

I think her wrist is broken.
I think a link of spine is lost.

Her breath is an agitation around her.
The man's breath mingles with hers.
His hand is wrapped
in black wool,
a bandage or
a fingerless glove.

I can't hear his words
but I can see the air
that holds them.

Another woman,
out walking her dog,
unhooks it from its leash.

With its steaming tongue
it sprints
for the fallen woman.

My chest is cold.
We didn't set the heat last night.
The snap was unexpected.

I lift a sweater
from a steel trunk
plastered with destinations:
Interlaken, Rome.
Old tokens
of a stranger's travels.

After a moment's
wrestling with wool
my head and hands
emerge.

The women
and the man,
the dog and its tongue,
have gone.
Their footprints are meshed
and filling.

Something slips
from the folds of the sweater
and clinks
on the floor boards.

I should bend
to pick it up.
I should put it
in a box
or on a high shelf,
out of the way.

But I won't do that.
I can't look at it.
I think I know
what it is,
though I can't be sure.

Filtered through
the simulacrum
of lung
winter casts
a glow like that
of the adjustable lamp
in an autopsy room.

I think I can see
a shift
in the map,
a trickle
or twitch
in its compass of fronds.

Peter Norman sees from the inside out.