Mid-December:

and once I walked through those doors
there would lay everywhere melting
piles of slushy snow on the moist, sucking
earth … once grass …

shivering in the cool immobility of the silent air,
so full of wet feet and frozen ears.

The world would be grey then …
grey the color of secret meetings
and unvoiced anxieties,
of congenial self-absorption
through curtained apartment days
and never-ending multi-blanketed nights.

I was a dark man on the moors,
striding boldly across deserted streets,
cloak billowing behind me,
wonderful destinations and tempting confrontations ahead.

A secret message, laughing,
and now I'm staring through black-beaded rails
at frost-caressed stairwells,
sitting in windows that frame everything
in fragile strands of rainclouds and dusk.

Written sometime around 1989, about college. Of course. Although it seems overwrought to me now, I must admit that I really like the last stanza.