A well-stocked pantry

My wife went into the pantry for peaches but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed the house was pregnant, she said — it was crying, so I cried back — then she cried, the woman I barely know after sixteen years — why just the other day, she told me she’d always been afraid #2 pencils might be made of what they’re named — but even crying it was cute — pink and scrunchy-eyed — like a newt balloon someone had blown up until puffy and ready to pop — it was as if the universe decided it was time to act our age — that’s when we threw all our heroin out — took the high-wire down and stopped skeet shooting in the living room — and as much as I miss yelling Pull while stoned and standing on the edge of the air, looking into the abyssal fall I sorta desperately want, someone’s gotta change the diapers and burp the thing when it fills with swamp-gas or whatever that is — the miracle, you know, of birth is that my wife and I gave up hang gliding for making the nummy sound against the belly of the beast who showed up and took over — just as once, I shot the rapids, popped out, squirmed against my mother and destroyed every other future she might have lived but one — long before I could speak, I was cruel — for a few seconds, I let my mother believe I was everything she ever wanted — and even now, decades after my few perfect seconds as a baby, if I called, at the first unexpected brush of Hey, ma against her ear, she’d still be hoodwinked by the tidal pull of my voice on the ghost of a womb they long ago ripped out, that she was holding a full moon in her arms