Verge

A month at least before the bloom and already five bare-limbed cherries by the highway ringed in a haze of incipient fire —middle of the afternoon, a faint pink-bronze glow. Some things wear their becoming: the night we walked, nearly strangers, from a fevered party to the corner where you'd left your motorcycle, afraid some rough wind might knock it to the curb, you stood on the other side of the upright machine, other side of what would be us, and tilted your head toward me over the wet leather seat while you strapped your helmet on, engineer boots firm on the black pavement. Did we guess we'd taken the party's fire with us, somewhere behind us that dim apartment cooling around its core like a stone? Can you know, when you're not even a bud but a possibility poised at some brink? Of course we couldn't see ourselves, though love's the template and rehearsal of all being, something coming to happen where nothing was… But just now I thought of a troubled corona of new color, visible echo, and wondered if anyone driving in the departing gust and spatter on Seventh Avenue might have seen the cloud breathed out around us as if we were a pair of—could it be?—soon-to-flower trees.