No Longer Here

New York’s preliminary Spring creeps
tenuously out in very early April – as if sure

that spreading its soft lacework too precipitously
in the sudden wake of winter’s shadowed
shape will kill it. And so it sifts, alights and sits

bare, in a faint outline of pink and blue
and green: pale pastel at seventy degrees,
untrusting, sure this warmth is premature.

Its presence quietly calls glory from a distance –
but doesn’t last more than a whispered day or two –
before it’s flooded by preliminary Summer.

Perhaps it knows it never needed to feel fear.
But we can’t ask. It’s no longer here.

.