MIRIAM O’NEAL

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.