Breast Milk

The eyes wide or weighty

with it. The full boat

or low tide of  it.

The leopard of  it

when it leaps. Nervous

before a sermon, Saint Bernard

prayed for help and the Virgin appeared,

babe in lap, to squirt him in the eye

with a wondrous stream of it,

thus gifting him with eloquence.

The sun-white glow of  it

in dimmed-down rooms

across galaxies, galaxies, galaxies.

The  Romans admired a mother

who visited her father, sentenced

to starve to death, in prison

and kept him alive with it,

secretly. The leopard

of  it when it leaps.

Ten children my great-grandmother

nursed, from one breast—

the other side never made, maybe,

a country doctor thought,

because of  her childhood polio.

The creation ex nihilo of  it,

across the galaxy’s pale cream.

In a short story by Maupassant,

a train is stopped far from anywhere

and one car holds two strangers,

a very hungry man and a nursemaid,

painfully engorged. And that’s all

you really need to know,

except, it occurs to me, she

must have been hungry too.