BEING A CONSTELLATION [enlarge]

 

Heavy with my milk, you move

your compact body, though I hold

you dense under a constellation

whose sparse lights ache over you.

 

If, looking up, you recognize

the shadowing of curves that casts

towards my belly, and the way

my nipples travel, like two stars

 

twinned by your eyesight; if my arms

take night, and keep it from the sky,

if my night voice can stop your cry,

I'll be the Mother over you.

 

You are a question, small and dense,

and I am an answer, long diffuse

and dark, but I want to be sky

for you so, like the stars, I lie,

 

holding my far lights wide and flat

in pictures for your eyes to take,

spaced easily, so you can catch

the patterns in your sleepy net.

 

From Eve