My Egg of Longing

We shall just go on being this, we will be uncertain forever
in our tender and unwilling child-hearts,
hopeful and wandering,
doing the shopping and looking out the front-room window
at the grey-green city evening,
waiting for when to dress for dinner,
and never knowing what to say
or how to pick up the phone --
or even to remember that we're all
made up of ways to fill our days
and while them away,
and the shelved, hard wearing remnants of our sneakers-and-backpack childhoods,
the small voices who still remember trusting
that some greater, sleeping self soon would wake,
larger, capable, impossibly knowing.

Lately, where you are concerned
it's as though, under my ribs,
someone has scooped out
all my ticking, beating inner workings
and replaced them with longing,
whole and perfect,
as empty and round and boundless as any open space.
I breathe through it, and wait
and store things there,
the folded things of our better days.
I look at them from time to time.

I would sit at your feet with joy,
patient.
I would walk with you, arm in arm and
lean against your shoulder, thus,
and know the feel of those mundane and nourishing sensations,
coat sleeves, warm-firm flesh, hard elbow, solid shoulder bone.
If you might hold me, I would tell you,
speak into your coat collar and
tell you anything, all things,
would let you keep them all, my little wooden spin-top thoughts,
only painted trinkets, they'd be yours.
you might keep me,
and not fault me for the pressed leaf
of girlhood that I carry--
if I could speak to you this way,
if you could see past the measured temperament of your mid-less heart,
see me as a bold and quaking thing,
we could be happy.
We might.