BREECH

by Katherine West

It was a difficult birth--

She had been crushed

In the womb

The left ear

Smaller

Tighter

A shell

A fossil

An accident 

Incarnated by time

It was a difficult birth--

Breech

The cord around her neck

One foot trapped

Behind

As if she had tried

To run

Each contraction

Tightening the noose

But when she finally

Arrived

She opened like a wild iris

In the meadow

After rain--

She ran everywhere

Singing

Touching

Climbing the tallest trees

As a woman

She began to wilt

The trapped foot

Turned inward

So she walked with a limp

One shoulder higher

As the spine

Tried to adjust--

She could not run

The phantom cord

Choked her breath

Asthma

Shut her lungs

The neck

Stiffened--

The fossil

Fetus

At one with stone

Lived only in the eyes

Sharp as an owl’s

Friends

With every sister

In the Pleiades

Orion’s nebula

The rabbit in the moon

Lived only in ears

Sensitive

To mice

In dry leaves

Javelinas digging for roots

Deer

Ripping up mouthfuls of grass

Lived only

In song--

A low

Hollow

Call

The owl answered

Taking her away

An egg for its nest

Its warm breast

Of feathers

And when the egg cracked

When she pushed

Her way out

Her wings opened

Long and perfect

And when the owl nudged

Her to the edge

She fell

Like a star

* * * * *

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness and performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and New Verse News, which recently nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize.