He was born in a rust shed small and cold yet
at night he was warmed beneath his mother's coat
damp with sweat and hope.
He formed love for her before he could form the word love
and she too loved him so. She told him.
They two together within the world and not against it
that is what she believed not because she was raised that way but because the grass grew every spring like morning rises from night and she could not explain it.
She explained little, not even why she loved him and he preferred it that way,
and inside those shed walls he wondered to himself one autumn afternoon when he was six -
Mama, is this home?
and she held him and rocked him and said Almost
and she caught him quiet and surprised because
Had he spoken his question out loud?
he would never know and it wouldn't matter.
He would learn as he grew into a man: answers come this way.
And when his feet touched down upon wooden floorboards inside bigger walls and bigger rooms he invited his mother in and took her coat and hung it in the foyer closet and welcomed her home and she smiled and cupped her small hands around a secret.
She sat upright because the chair contour asked it of her, her legs too short for her toes to touch the ground. But she sat proud and listening to the stories of his life and her eyes twinkled because she remembered the stories he couldn't and his eyes twinkled because, actually, he could.
His little eyes had watched her move inside many a shadows of that shed, her warm prayers pluming, rising, vanishing. Into the frigid air. She always thought he was sleeping but love works its way into the heart. In the quiet night. Almost means hope.
She had covered him warm each night in
I Love You. And as his tiny body exhaled beside hers,
he covered her over, too.
They both knew this love exactly.
