If I Sleep While My Baby Sleep

I will hear his sleep in and through my own, my sleep will be bathed in his as if we slept in one same fluid My sleep floats within a listening so deep that the separating spaces of air become as pliant and full as snowfall, its singing silence as profound My ears and his throat — the sensation of anticipated hearing close inside the ear and the incipient murmur or cry forming at the end of his sleep — borne like birds and thrumming on the air of rooms between us My own sleep will be his clock, safely keeping time, his sleep tunes my dreams to listen, our sleep binds the hour, heavy and warm, into a blanket of air and sound