Delivered

The little creek,

its mossy shoulders,

fox scat―metallic green beetles

in black thumb-lengths of dung.

Cracked freshwater clamshells,

their opalescence shards of moon.

Birds stirring in the closed brush.

The sky fills the sylph of water

the way a child fills its mother up

until she is simply vessel;

until her labor bears down

like night on a mirror.

The eyes collect each particle of light.

The mind assembles.

Wraps in the odor of cold water,

the laughter lugged out of each little current by small stones.

All of it cocooned in a pocket

of a woods.

Before the nurse swaddled me

in a blanket from an oven in the wall

I lay trembling

like some icy creek a boot-clad girl has splashed through,

her eyes fixed on the far side.