Beyond the café window,
snowfall plots to make the campus a canvas.
Why is memory like that handful of breadcrumbs
tossed to birds by a boy?
And what does that boy think? Only he knows,
sunlight hammering through cloud-cover
like penance handed down by a disgraced priest,
and flake by flake,
inch by inch,
the past deepens,
and for a split second I’m him,
before he turns into a sapling I saw once in a pastel painting,
leaning into the wind
because the artist knew we want what weathers us most.
There’s such resentment.
In the bare branches. In the starlings. In the boy,
laughing, trying to lick the air,
snowflakes dissolving on his tongue.
He knows how to handle the past.
For him, seconds don’t chisel like a pickaxe,
his heart is not an abandoned hornet nest,
he has no memory, yet—
Unlike us,
suddenly frightened by a fire alarm,
until someone yells it’s just a drill.
