Sculpture: step before one

Sculpture:

step before one

Things borrow splendor

                                Brenda Hillman

                                “Quartz Tractate”

It’s true and it may even be simply a coincidence

of the right light in the right eye at the right 

time how happening by and up a hill I miss

the root and skid elbow to wrist

into a ground grouse nest.  And all

the shells have been laid              open

and they’ve either flown              or been

larder stolen, broken ...              and one

way or the other              they’ve flown or been

flown.  Listen,

that there’s still                a shell.  And I'm holding it.  Because isn’t

something always            consuming something

else?  Isn’t          the random rain that dropped

its pants an hour              before I arrived eating

up some sky       somewhere ahead of me

and that rain,     what still falls branch-

to- branch-to- leaf                    -to leaf- to- finally cracked

open shell to sit in                           the curve of it is

somewhere up so far ahead even trying   to run 

won’t get me wet.  For a while I                can forget

that I’ve fallen that on my way down

to the                    bottom the other roots and rocks took

their turn             with me, that the blood

I’m bleeding       has needed to breathe

for a long,            long       time, to say “I’ve been out-

side I have          and it’s green and wet and has

flecks  of cracked             and jagged...oh it’s a

different kind of noise, its wider its quiet

I don’t want to go back in       side.” I think of it,

sitting in the mud, before brushing it

all out, how the roux in my head loosens

and the bees come back and rest with me

in the wet.          I think, not about falling,

I think about         not falling instead how if I hadn’t

that cracked       shell with the bowl

water that b-     lood dripping off

my elbow            and pat-pat-patting

the                  green leaves, just think

this ill-   umination this chance sore

illumination rising like river water

in the sun was on my side was holding

me up glowing to the gods.  And I thanked

them with my blood.  Nobody   meets a deity

without getting gouged.  I may have            said but not

in my head.  I said it getting up,                                 I said it dropping

the shell, I said it slipping a little                 going back

home while the bugs, sensing    what I dropped

because it glowed, rove over it while it glowed:     a smudge of rain

a smudge of skin

a smudge of blood.