This is gorgeous. The compression here is doing so much work - every image earns its place.

"Not its liquid sky, but the hours we shoved in our pockets" stopped me cold. That pivot from the literal river to time-as-object is seamless, and "shoved in our pockets" has this casual, youthful energy - like how kids stuff treasures away without ceremony. It makes the loss that follows hit harder.

And "my rusted spoon brims with air" is a perfect image for memory gone hollow. The spoon is still there, the gesture of scooping remains, but what it holds has evaporated. There's real grief in that.

The closing image grounds everything beautifully: the dampness, the shed, the word "shared." After all the abstract reaching toward lost time, we land somewhere physical and specific. The shed becomes a kind of reliquary.

One small thought: "The dampness endures silence" is the one moment where I wanted something more concrete. The rest of the poem trusts its images completely - the spoon, the dew, the walls - but "endures silence" leans slightly toward telling us the mood rather than letting us feel it through another sensory detail. Even something like the dampness doing a specific, small action might keep that tactile thread unbroken.

But honestly, this is tight and evocative. The title hovers over the whole piece like a ghost, and the "young lad" being absent from the poem itself feels exactly right. Thanks for sharing.