Unlike hair, the pin feather
is alive. Not an assembly line
of dead cell on dead cell, cut
or curled for beauty, but blood
alive: oxygen for carbon dioxide.
If cut open, painful alive.
Wet, deep, womb alive,
Grendel’s mother alive, before
the loss of blood or her son,
when loss is not mistaken for living,
even though it starts and ends
in the same dark place.