Half-cupid (writing exercise)
Jul. 6th, 2020 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfractureAnother writing group this afternoon. These seem to be helping me, so I'm hoping I am able to continue.
Here's the best bit from today. The prompt was "How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River" by Barbara Crooker. (Here it is in a random blog I googled up.)
You can guess that the lines I worked from most were "how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try" and "What isn't given to love / is so much wasted."
Half-cupid
Half-cupid stands in a corner of the grounds at Government House. He takes some finding. If you reach the graveyard, you are moving in the right direction. Turn before you enter. Go into the trees. Down there at the bottom of the wood is a grove, and in the grove is Half-cupid.
On one side, he is an ordinary statue, features weather-worn into ever more boyish lines, an embryo god with a blank bow. Sometime he was a whole cupid, but now if you approach him from below, you'll see his right side has crumbled away: he's just a silhouette.
At dusk, approaching by moonlight, if by accident you walked by him first and then came uncertainly back, you might see a childish form that refused to resolve, remaining flat as a shadow; or a boy in the process of youthening; or something halved, frightening not because you didn't understand what it was, but because you did.
Half-cupid has one ear, one hemisphere of stone curls, one wing, one hand, one foot set flat to push from his pedestal into the sky. One chubby leg, half a stone bottom on which a small bird has built and abandoned a nest, half a smile -- the mischievous, corner-twisted half, fearful without its mirror.
Of course, by dusk, you are not supposed to be on the grounds of Government House at all. If you were caught in the woods by a security team, you might be taken for a threat to the Lieutenant-Governor's household, or at best a disruption of that nebulous entity, the Peace -- unless, by seizing a forked branch in your left hand and pawing the earth with your stiff right shoe, you could be changed into a stag, plucking at the moon with his antlers, nosing through the rubble for wild roses.
{rf}
Here's the best bit from today. The prompt was "How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River" by Barbara Crooker. (Here it is in a random blog I googled up.)
You can guess that the lines I worked from most were "how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try" and "What isn't given to love / is so much wasted."
Half-cupid
Half-cupid stands in a corner of the grounds at Government House. He takes some finding. If you reach the graveyard, you are moving in the right direction. Turn before you enter. Go into the trees. Down there at the bottom of the wood is a grove, and in the grove is Half-cupid.
On one side, he is an ordinary statue, features weather-worn into ever more boyish lines, an embryo god with a blank bow. Sometime he was a whole cupid, but now if you approach him from below, you'll see his right side has crumbled away: he's just a silhouette.
At dusk, approaching by moonlight, if by accident you walked by him first and then came uncertainly back, you might see a childish form that refused to resolve, remaining flat as a shadow; or a boy in the process of youthening; or something halved, frightening not because you didn't understand what it was, but because you did.
Half-cupid has one ear, one hemisphere of stone curls, one wing, one hand, one foot set flat to push from his pedestal into the sky. One chubby leg, half a stone bottom on which a small bird has built and abandoned a nest, half a smile -- the mischievous, corner-twisted half, fearful without its mirror.
Of course, by dusk, you are not supposed to be on the grounds of Government House at all. If you were caught in the woods by a security team, you might be taken for a threat to the Lieutenant-Governor's household, or at best a disruption of that nebulous entity, the Peace -- unless, by seizing a forked branch in your left hand and pawing the earth with your stiff right shoe, you could be changed into a stag, plucking at the moon with his antlers, nosing through the rubble for wild roses.
{rf}
no subject
Date: 2020-07-07 04:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-07 05:29 am (UTC)I sometimes think it wouldn't be *that* difficult to hide down in the wooded area.
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Date: 2020-07-07 07:08 am (UTC)I like this a lot.
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Date: 2020-07-07 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-07 10:30 am (UTC)Did I already tell you the story about the one time my father went hunting? I think I did. Where he saw a man running along the railroad track, and he wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to be running around in the woods in hunting season wearing a brown fur coat... With antlers attached to his head. As the man ran by him it became a deer.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-07 03:32 pm (UTC)I presume he did not shoot Deer.
Ha, well, I wrote it as prose originally, and then thought "Maybe this is a series of linked poems?", but I am equally willing to see it as a story. Thank you for the inclination.
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Date: 2020-07-07 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-07 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 01:47 am (UTC)https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/12568119.html
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Date: 2020-07-08 03:00 am (UTC)I left a reply to your comment over there -- maybe I'll also reply directly to his post.