a drop of venom or of honey
Equinox
Now is the time of year when bees are wild
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors.
I have found their dried husks in my clothes.
They are dervishes because they are dying,
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze
a drop of venom or of honey.
After the stroke we thought would be her last
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped
a nurse across the face. Then she stood up,
walked outside, and lay down in the snow.
Two years later there is no other way
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.
~Elizabeth Alexander
***
An easy fast to those of you observing Yom Kippur.
***
Has this month sped by, or is it just me? The whole summer, really. Wasn't it just June? I feel like I turned around for a second and now it's September. On the other hand, why isn't it October yet? Time is making me crazy, apparently.
***
I feel like I'm really struggling lately to make my stories have a point. I need to feel like I'm saying something when I write, even if it's something other people have said before, or even something I've said before but in a different way or from a different perspective, but lately, I'm like, so what am I saying that I haven't said before? And lately, I find that I think I'm saying one thing, and then when I get to the end of the story, I realize I'm saying something else - sometimes it's a similar thing, just shifted by degrees, but sometimes it's something else altogether, and I'm like, "huh. how'd that happen?" And then I have to go back and fix some stuff.
So I have a few WsIP where I am still unable to find the point, and while I am generally not a person who writes to a specific theme (obviously, if it keeps sneaking up on me), sometimes I reach a point in a story where I kind of need to know it, so I can understand what's going on so I can figure out what's going to happen next, and when I don't, I just kind of stall out. Usually, eventually, someone will say something or I'll read something, or some new piece of canon will (finally, thank god) come along to throw everything into a new light, or I'll just be in a different headspace, and it will all click into place. Sometimes that doesn't happen, and they stay unfinished and languish on my hard drive, or I force it anyway (if there's a deadline involved), and I read the story and can feel that there's something off somewhere, but I never figure out how to fix it (which is kind of good, because I don't know that I'd want to go back and rewrite any of my old stories; they are what they are, and I was who I was when I wrote them, and it feels like cheating, or like trying to put on clothes that no longer fit, to change that).
All of this is just to say that though I am still irritated with some of my stories for not writing themselves, I at least no longer feel like I'll never write another word again.
***
Now is the time of year when bees are wild
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors.
I have found their dried husks in my clothes.
They are dervishes because they are dying,
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze
a drop of venom or of honey.
After the stroke we thought would be her last
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped
a nurse across the face. Then she stood up,
walked outside, and lay down in the snow.
Two years later there is no other way
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.
~Elizabeth Alexander
***
An easy fast to those of you observing Yom Kippur.
***
Has this month sped by, or is it just me? The whole summer, really. Wasn't it just June? I feel like I turned around for a second and now it's September. On the other hand, why isn't it October yet? Time is making me crazy, apparently.
***
I feel like I'm really struggling lately to make my stories have a point. I need to feel like I'm saying something when I write, even if it's something other people have said before, or even something I've said before but in a different way or from a different perspective, but lately, I'm like, so what am I saying that I haven't said before? And lately, I find that I think I'm saying one thing, and then when I get to the end of the story, I realize I'm saying something else - sometimes it's a similar thing, just shifted by degrees, but sometimes it's something else altogether, and I'm like, "huh. how'd that happen?" And then I have to go back and fix some stuff.
So I have a few WsIP where I am still unable to find the point, and while I am generally not a person who writes to a specific theme (obviously, if it keeps sneaking up on me), sometimes I reach a point in a story where I kind of need to know it, so I can understand what's going on so I can figure out what's going to happen next, and when I don't, I just kind of stall out. Usually, eventually, someone will say something or I'll read something, or some new piece of canon will (finally, thank god) come along to throw everything into a new light, or I'll just be in a different headspace, and it will all click into place. Sometimes that doesn't happen, and they stay unfinished and languish on my hard drive, or I force it anyway (if there's a deadline involved), and I read the story and can feel that there's something off somewhere, but I never figure out how to fix it (which is kind of good, because I don't know that I'd want to go back and rewrite any of my old stories; they are what they are, and I was who I was when I wrote them, and it feels like cheating, or like trying to put on clothes that no longer fit, to change that).
All of this is just to say that though I am still irritated with some of my stories for not writing themselves, I at least no longer feel like I'll never write another word again.
***