Mother With Child

The mother let the baby surface.
He had a head ripe like a piece of sulfur,
And his eyes were tiny, sharp, green stones
That a boy might have scooped up out of the dirt
And placed there like a fresh coin or a promise
In the palm of someone's hand.

He floated out of the womb to reclaim the world
From the dark container of his mother's dreams,
From the opaque surface of the facts that had shaped her dreams like a concern,
As if the facts concerned her dreams
Or might mingle with them, spawning
The changing hopelessness of every day. He emerged.

Eddies of the light ebbed over his body like riptides of lightning
And electrocuted unwrapped eye-bulbs in the current
Of a vision whose precious metals and semi-conductors
Conducted him into the endless space...

But already the fatal juices were flowing from his mother's mammaries;
Already she was nursing them in swollen glands...