It was not weight or girth that made his presence heavy,
But a gravity.
He was like snow,
Out of the corner of my tiny eye,
Calm and silent and heavy, solemn.
Falling, too.
He was falling slowly.
His hands were in the pockets
Of his black jacket,
And I’d never known that to be
A mannerism of his,
Which meant he was acting.
Unfurling from him,
A long stream of steam, like the breath of a dragon.
I saw him steel willed,
Magma veined,
As powerful as I‘d always suspected,
Found hints of at the end of the fraying rope
He’d given me to hold onto.
I saw, scorching through the cracks in his skin,
Peeking through the edges of his eyes and reflecting in his glasses,
Something much bigger than he now looked,
And I released my own gray air into the winter.
The icy sidewalk burned on through the soles of my tennis shoes.