Spring

the boy sitting on the steps is the kind of five a.m. dark before the time turns back, changes its mind. it is march, and his cold bones are missing the snow. shrugging into the indifferent charcoal of his winter jacket, he exhales curling blossoms of steam rubs his hands together the new skin flushed, shy (he scraped them stinging-raw summiting walls, not so long ago) his fingers, still tender and pink and tingling with cold, curl into fiddleheads on the concrete. he has got nowhere else to be but here. the earnest clouds converge again, darken – a certain gray, a swept slate as he sits still and waits for rain, or for spring.