James Bond Romance Antithesis

Our love
Is not a stampede of horses
Or tidal wave
Or explosion
Or fire
Or drug
Or battlefield
Or any other dangerous metaphor once scrawled madly into song.

Our love
Is rather
A quiet inhale
That takes in all of you –
Your breath from dinner
Your wrinkled shirt
Your five o’clock shadow
     Your aging body
       Your imperfect everything 
– and finds there

oxygen.

The seasons of a new boy

It goes like this.

The sun beats down on you for the first time when we emerge from the birthing center. Your eyes are closed and your skin smells new and you’re so tiny that the world at once feels giant and welcoming.

Leaves change colors and so does your hair, growing in tune to your increasingly chunky body that snuggles into my shoulder as I take you with me everywhere – from backyard to refrigerator to stove. I master the one-handed egg crack and you master perfect slumber on the hip of a new mother; habitually swaying a tiny body back and forth, back and forth, like an autumn leaf drifting peacefully to the soft ground.

The world gets smaller when winter storms rage, and we create a universe in our two-bedroom upstairs apartment where exist warm baths and fuzzy pajamas and a big laugh from a tiny belly, rich as hot chocolate and deep as the snow.

Today you revel in the feel of damp grass beneath your still-tiny toes and fresh fruit on your jabbering tongue. Soon the sun will beat down again on a person who is no longer so new; whose eyes are wide open, whose knees are carpet burned, who far prefers dancing to snuggling, but whose cheeks remain as pink and delicious as strawberry cotton candy.

It goes like this. I race to keep up with the swiftly-moving seasons, which play like a movie that I am powerless to pause except in snippets of memory and two-dimensional Facebook albums. So I’ll revel, captivated, in each day and week and month. I’ll store up each fleeting laugh and cry and slobberkiss in my pounding, infatuated heart.

And I hope that once in a while you’ll still want to snuggle – even when wrinkles frame my face like the thousand winding pathways that lie ahead, and these seasons turn my hair into swirling winter snow.

For a little boy

You.

All of you –

Your chunky thighs that kick when you’re surprised

Or enraged

Or ecstatic.

Your three-almost-four-toothed smile that flows into your eyes

That squint in a way that makes me think maybe

maybe a person could really burst from joy

or a really good secret.

You.

You and your arms that flap when you’re excited

And it’s as if you’re going to fly away;

right out of my arms and become

One of the dancing snowflakes out the window.

You and your soft forehead that touches mine

When you need the kind of assurance that can only come

From a nice meaningful forehead touch.

You.

Your tiny mouth that says mama and so many non-words

Only you don’t just say them but yell them

and whisper them and try them out in every part of your mouth so that you savor the sensation of speech.

And that mouth opens wide now for airplanes and choo-choo trains that carry rainbows for cargo –

a spectrum of flavors and textures that elicit an “mmm” and a grin every single time.

You.

You who are unafraid of failure

Unafraid to laugh until your whole body aches

You who forgive in an instant

And love unconditionally

For whom I would do any crazy chicken dance that I’ve never done for anyone else

At any time of the day

just to see your toothy smile for another instant.

You who breaks my heart with a cry or a cough

And mends it again with a laugh.

You came from me. And sometimes I do a double take just remembering

There was ever a time when you weren’t.

But I feel like a bigger person in the world knowing that because I am

You are

And because you are

I am

whole. 

April showers

I’ve never felt so safe

As when we’re lying in bed

While the rain falls on our roof

And the dog sleeps at our feet

And we hold hands

while I drift softly in and out of dreams. 

7 a.m.

He breathes in the day at the same time I do. The new air floating down as the white sun stretches up.

I breathe deeper and he swims, somersaults, to a rhythm of his own making. A long stretch here, a graceful bounce there. 

And I feel his every movement in a way unlike anything I’ve felt before. His dance is part of me, yet already so much his own. 

I whisper a lullaby as the half-light of sunrise penetrates the blinds. My belly ripples in response like a gentle wave at sea.

And together, my son and I, we greet the day and each other before the world wakes up and interrupts.

Energized each 7 a.m. by a sacred morning routine. 

A poem I dreamed then woke up and wrote down.

If I stand in this now-lonely stairwell

If I stare at this empty brick wall

Will I see your lips in the ridges

Or your shy gaze in the mortar?

If I climb to the top of this wintery hill

Where vows were made in summer

Where vows were kept in fall

And turn my back to the breeze

Will I feel your warm breath on my neck

Or see your arms outstretched in the bare branches?

If I travel to a city where we’ve never been

Free of vows, of longing, of looks leading to lips

Will a wall remain a wall?

Would a tree be just wood?

Or will a brick remind me of a stairwell remind me of a kiss

And a tree remind me of a hill remind me of a ring

So that I can never escape you like I can’t escape the wind on a hilltop

Or a sigh in an empty bed.

Morning bike ride

In Hawaii the sun is libertine

she kisses everyone-

the relentless roosters

The copious coconut trees

The brown-backed surfers

And me.

In Hawaii the sun makes the warm cloudy mist rise from the ground

Here the morning mist is the gloomy cold gripping greedily to car exhaust.

My skin is not kissed but freeze-dried

A brief stripe of warmth intermingles with the cold breeze.  Car exhaust?  Or the last fighting gust of summer?

Or perhaps my imagination.

The sun has given me the cold shoulder.

I look up

And realize

The sun has a different job here.

She is an artist

Who has painted the mountain with her morning light

Until it glows with pride in a hundred shades of orange and yellow.

I forgive you, Fall.

Haiku

Chicken on the roof
Bullying pigeons up there
Laie don't change