A world-black space, cracked and speckled, the bottom receding into earth-brown, rising into peaks and promontories, stretching out into legs and hips and reaching arms; on the right, a child, perhaps no more than three years old (but millenia in terms of earth, and he never existed); on the right, the young but ancient mother. Or is it his sister? Swaddled in a cascading cloak that finally tumbles into a stream of vertical lines and ends with the support of two paw-like feet, separated only by two glaring borders from the brown fundament, but poised against the raw, black paint. Her hair is dark, and gathered together like a magnolia just budding from the soil-brown scarf wrapped many times about her temples. An ear, jutting like the handle of a teacup, interrupts her oily mass of hair, and it is interrupted, also, by the mountainous patterns (and stretching plains? -- but in any event, pure triangles) of the scarf, which, by consequence, begins to look (bonnet-like) a boat sailing small on the blackened mass.

Her lips are curved into a slight smile, and the space before nostrils and nose (a diagonal line from the temples (scarf-swarthed), diverging in a little jut) is lightly freckled, spotted with time. Her aubern face is not, in the least, fair by powdered makeup, but a certain natural glaze colors her features by absence of form (i.e. the jutting black). Beneath the cloak is a lined and wrinkled vest and then, her breast -- bare skin. How would you like to touch the voluptuousness of her bare skin? To trace the smooth idea in mind? The pulse quickens in the remembered sight of a lady. She, staring off into space, her empty gaze touching (like empty hands touching in the absence of presence), reaching out for a child.

Who is this child? If not for the gravity of a several squared and curved bench (pluming out into quills and peackock's eyes) she would fall into endless nothing. But she sits, hunched back, falling forward with extended hand, open, not grasping, and meanwhile tender limbs stretch strenuously toward her, across the divide. Is she mother? Is she sister? Is she the latent object of an erotic desire? Would you, small child, like to touch her skin, carress her lips? Do you see the reflection of a child in her eyes, do you see again your face, do you see yourself, multiplied throughout the earth in eternal birth? You see nothing, you think nothing; if a latent desire, then hidden, deep hidden in the smoothness of your skin, hidden like the numbers of dissheveled hair. And yet your eyes look out towards us, gazing as if into a mirror, a reproach. Lips curled into a slight sneer, hands almost like blocks, overlapping; the mother puts a single out with some generous care, but you stretch your entire little body until it might snap, and try to break the confines of your tomb-like chair. You want, and legs bend and push as if striking against a wall of solid black. Trapped out there in that mass; to be a figure; the absurdity of it -- an ancient Greek! Stressed with becoming, and waiting with a laid down burden. Is your tiny springing form, full of receptive, eager life, the cancellation of passive motherhood extending into darkness? The womb is ultimate death? But the edges of the circle are browned, and brown, and cracked with dirt, the solid earth. These shapes, a myriad of triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles; like the architecture of our bones and our bodies; make something of nothing and brew in our minds the bubbling stream of awakening sleep.