A man walks down a hall toward his naked father, who is working a bicycle pump. The scene is absurd and faintly obscene, and the poem delivers it in the flat voice of someone reporting a dream to a doctor or a friend. That deadpan tone is what makes it unsettling. Nothing in the language flinches, even as the image grows stranger.
The dream is a story of approach. The dreamer starts "at the end / of a long hall," sees a figure far off, and walks "towards his father." Only gradually does he make out what is happening. First the father is "bent over an object he could not define," then the object turns out to be a pump, then a "goomey women," then his mother. The poem moves like a camera slowly closing in, and each step brings a fuller, more disturbing identification. The odd spelling of "goomey" suggests something rubbery and toy-like, and the plural "women" next to a singular "she" adds to the sense of slippage. The inflatable object has not yet become a person, and the mother's identity arrives almost as an afterthought: she "got bigger and bigger / and was his mother."
The rhythm does much of the work. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, but it is full of repetition that imitates the pumping. "Up and down up and down" runs without punctuation, and "bigger and bigger" appears twice, the second time stretched across the line break so that the growth seems to continue between lines. The repeated phrase "from between her legs" is almost mechanical, as if the poem itself had become a pump. Line lengths vary sharply. The long line "at the other end of the hall he saw the nude figure of his" spills over so that "father" hangs alone on the next line, a small visual jolt. Short lines like "up and down" and "and suddenly" then work like held breaths before the birth.
The central image is comic and grotesque at once. A bicycle pump is an everyday, slightly silly tool, and using it to conjure a woman, and then a child, turns conception and birth into a kind of workshop job. The father does the work while the mother simply fills with air. Her legs "began to rise / and separate" without any action of her own. Read this way, the dream shows how a child might imagine his origins: a scene he cannot witness and can only reconstruct, in which the parents become mechanical, his mother passive and his father an almost faceless operator. The child's head, "filled" by "the pumping air," is likewise inflated rather than born, a balloon more than a baby.
Two questions frame the dream and mark the dreamer's uncertainty. "Was it a dark hall?" shows him doubting even the setting, and "Was it his brother?" shows him failing to recognise the baby. The second question matters most. The dreamer watches his own birth and cannot place the child. He assumes it must be someone else, a sibling, because it is impossible to see oneself arrive in the world.
The final stanza turns on this. After a pause on the page, the poem moves from dream to waking, and the important event is not the dream but the telling: "after he had told the dream / he realized the child's head / was his." Insight comes through putting the experience into words. The dream held the answer all along, but only narration made it readable. The third-person "he" supports this, since the dreamer is observed from outside, much as he observed the child in the dream, and the poem's last move is the collapse of that distance.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It uses plain diction, almost no figurative language beyond its one extended image, and a quiet ending with no commentary. Yet it manages to be funny, disturbing, and psychologically sharp at once. It suggests that we are the last to recognise ourselves in our own stories, and that origins, the one thing everyone shares, stay hard to see directly.