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There was a place in which many gardens sat, each to attend to their own, some had many and others miniatures, but each with their own plot (an allegory for: universe). Everyone side by side. One such owner of one such place was taken, with a particular strength, by the act of sculpture from youth, till not quite old, as he now sat and continued. About the property were found two main gardens and one courtyard, each distinct from the other. The two gardens both carried nine sculptures, while the courtyard was host to six. The house had an array of others hidden about. These pieces made in both thoughtful haste, and blank length, resided with few eyes to view them. Nonetheless, as time, with inevitability, wore on, the sculptor became more and more bewitched with his active muse. The material, the shed, the work bench, and the slow etching of each line, of each curve, in each work. “Absolve me from sorrow and teach me of beauty” and “Life will most certainly strike us with both.” One morning, rising as things should (until they don’t), the hands of the sculptor began a fearful attempt at the daily ritual of sliding over bed sheets and twisting door handles. The sheets jumped and the handles jostled. Something like the spirit of an anxious ghost had possessed his hands, leaving stillness to flee, and aching to stay put. “What spirit has vexed me in my sleep?” Like a quarter toss we can be flipped off by both the head and tail of life (a true-ism of the writer). The gods in question loomed over head, absolved (I wish we could blame them). With each day stretching, holding on by sinews of seconds, the walk to the work bench was like a tightrope. The tools of choice became like backwards revolvers, pointing at nothing but the shooter. The material like steel against the fists of a rubber man. “The hand that cannot remain still won’t perform as the hand that can.” (You can decide what that means). Day by day, with no positive change, the sculptor began to leave, with lamentation, more time between work. The pain of not living up to your name. The few etchings forced out between bouts of despair were crude representations of the work he had once made, and all this devolution, happened seemingly, over night. He found that to be a conduit is not easy in environments that hinder conductivity. Summers passed, like broken hour hands that couldn’t be mended by braces or casts. With all that thick stillness, somehow time had still moved. Now waking, long in slumber, and bleary by sleep in the eye, the sculptor managed to work some. Tinkering here and tinkering there, little bits, out of habit like magnets. When after an unexplained amount of time, thirty things of rough aesthetic seemed to magically lay before him. Works of true painful deliberation. Who had taken these harsh obscurities and said they didn’t reveal beauty as an essence (the sculptor)? And who says (God perhaps) that isn’t more beautiful than that which punches you in the face (Both hurt, by the way)? Tell the sculptor that the beauty of the tree lies within the dirt. “You taught me in my time of darkness” and “I let the divine have its way with me.” For no one speaks fully out of their own free will, knowing they are somehow propped up by some providence that exists outside their bodies. Plagued with questions, he walked through the gardens he attended, and arrayed with statues. Things boiling down to thoughts like “what if what I got is what I’m left with?” And “what’s wrong with me?” These took up circles in his mind as the sculptor returned to his work bench, flinching body, unflinching mind to do what he was. The image of God. “What to do about thirty abstractions?” And, “Who cares?” Also maybe, “When will this trembling go away? If it ever could.”