--it is precious wearing racking colorful romance to be her mother: each mother-day holds gold-and-blue foreboding: each mother-day holds thin insistent gold-and-purple sorrows: each mother-day holds deep gold-and-gray care, incessant and absolute: an aching wealth of beauty: no more but no less than the damp of her hair in the noonday field. _My_ Child!--herself incessant and absolute: warm pure palpitant gold-of-my-life--
Someway realer than books I read and walks I take my Child clamors to be born.
My Child will never be born to any other woman. While she hovers and flutters on the edge of Mist-and-Silver--a border edge--there are ten million fertile hot milk-teeming bodies of women each ready to gather her in and wrap her in delicate-sweet flesh. Ten million other children hovering on the edge will drop off into the ten million matrix-cups--each woman mysteriously a fitting mother so only she wants her baby--though she be, besides, a thief or a traitor or a weakling or a murderer or a harlot or a drunkard or a fool.
Let them come, the ten million. The chrysalid children are clamoring, clamoring always for their birth: a wide ‘melody unheard.’
But my Child will never drop over the edge to any woman but me. She calls with veiled and dazzling flames of eagerness for her Birthday: but she will await my made-readiness through a long night, though it should last till the day-break of another age. Dimly I weep for her, my needing-me Child. I weep that she must come to this richly-cursed me. But I weep more that I have not got her in this sterile now, where is flawed passionate wealth of intangible life-stuff: but no small round wilful head of hair to wash: no little fellow’s feet on December flagstones and sweet dragging at my skirt: no soft pink-baby hunger--
It is hunger I feel from her. I feel her always _hungry_ where she is and I can give her no nourishing--no warming _food_ in all my strange unfertile passing life!
It is that less than my empty arms that makes blurred unrests and writhings in my Dreaming Womb.
Sometimes I fancy me married--a responsible wife, a housekeeping matron: with my window-sills full of potted plants.
I have a woman quality which seems uxoresque: I am someway a Right Shape and Size to be somebody’s wife. My bodily and astral dimensions have outlines apparently suitable for something in the married-woman way.