Taking Your Measure
Kim Vanderlaan
When you were small
we were in between times--
photographs were physical, developed;
requiring an actual room to process.
You were a child of absolute light:
the aperture and your smile always wide open.
I keep drawers full of those pictures: You --
propped on pillows in straight-backed chairs,
reaching for a shiny ring, a floppy doll, or my face
(you used to gum my chin, the drool glistening on its point.)
In each, your right fist is tightly clenched, just as it was in utero.
All forty weeks I wondered:
does that fist mean
he’ll be fierce and battle-happy?
– or just fiercely focused on the many tasks ahead of him?
As a toddler, walk-hopping across the summer grasses,
all ten fingers spread as if to steady your neatly packaged bulk
against the very air--you have blond wispy hair.
In another you are snuggle- hugged against
dad in the hammock,
hap-clapping hands,
you had
no sense
of the
bad.
To have you, an hour or two a day,
sleep-purring against my mother chest,
your whole self as perfect as a water color,
emitting even then your own odd fruity smell,
I can tell as your downy face
relaxes into animal slumber
that time will insist on working
against my wishes
(to have you
always like
this).
Now, how many years of you have I had in my life?
Far too few.
If you only knew
the many versions of you
I dreamed of seeing
in the World
Outside.
(none of them
compare to
You).
These days I brush my teeth, catching a view of you in the mirror behind me as you bathe:
you are singing “The Room Where It Happens” with voicy glee.
I cannot avert my eyes:
your slack, low sacks, relaxed in the water and the dark curling tendrils—
Manhood’s turf -- and the world begins to claim you.
Where to put my Mother Grief,
now, as it begins to blossom?