Shearwater

You were given feet but had never touched them to earth. You were given the sea and you fed upon it for months. So when your head crowned, ashen with loss of blood from the cord wound tight around your neck, and when they cut you from me, and you were silent, and the tide in me receded, I remembered the shearwaters following the ship—the slow sweep of them riding the wind’s current. The stretch of them, hovering, cruciform, shearing the air the way an envelope slides back into a box of letters, making its narrow space. I had watched from the stern for hours their trailing: as if stillness itself drifted toward me. I thought it was my life. Then someone lifted you up, and there was a sound, and they laid you on me, breathing.