the Heart Approaches What It Yearns

I sit here in Maggie’s walls, spilling my tears, spilling my ink, baring my soul, and the blog page counter turns, and sleep escapes me.

Sleep is my chance to let go, but tonight I would give it to the Littlest Boy, as he knows he’s in his mama’s walls but not his mama’s arms and his mama is only a memory, so

we steal to the rocker, a winter of discontent

folding into each other, the familiar panic

and then the reassurances, mine for him and his for me.

I’ve grown used to his smells:

the warm smell of his baby sweat, the sour smell he gets

just before he gets the sniffles;

I know it’s crazy but I can smell anxiety

almost before it hits his heart.

His fear feeds my love for him, and hour by hour the rocker

creaks as I hold him, his hands demand me,

grasping my new bathrobe in his tiny but incredible hands.

His face pressed to my chest, so young yet so old,

like a tiny little man, face wrinkled and intense

he tenuously clutches sleep, his reach exceeding his grasp.

“Shh-shh-shh-shhhhhhh … hush now,”

and I contemplate his wise old eyebrows, and I see a new bruise

I hadn’t seen before

check a scrape to make sure it’s now healed

the ghost of skinned knees past,

the spectre of the bruises yet to come…

I cry for his lost mama, and for my lost girlhood,

and for the memory of my empty arms.