Marco Yan
Castle
Amber-washed in the stretch of streetlight, Leo grabs at a monkey bar,
trying to haul himself up.
Down we sit on the rubber mulch.
Kit opens a bag of chips. Some wind, bleak, stirs by the swing set.
Cross-legged next to Ines, I’m shuffling cards for a round of whatever,
hearing them laugh, and suddenly
watching all of us in the playground,
this northern tip of our island outlined by fluorescence—seven
blocks behind us, forty stories high, eight flats on each floor.
And where to look, when all the glass above is clean
fire doubling its light on restive water?
Even the cranes at the dock down south, in stasis, hoist their own kind of shine.
The five of diamonds slips out of my hands, flits seaward.
Leo tells me to go over the edge and pick up the card.
He calls me a fool, and I say fools as if foolishness is what keeps our circle here
past midnight,
say I’m tired, and leave only to sit on a bench away from them.
How sporadic and quiet are fingers on light switches—the night becoming night again.
What we said and did to each other back in Tsing Yi are remembered
not as I remember it.
We were happy, sad, repulsive—who can be sure?
I was the watcher. What happened taught me to safeguard the dark
where we’d been radiant before we dimmed, slowly, in our own ways.
Marco Yan’s poems appear in Diode, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, The Pinch andmore. He was born and raised in Hong Kong. You can find him at www.marcoyan.com.