(no subject)
The disparaged poet sat under the giant oak tree, awkward, uncomfortable, and intentionally so, a desperate attempt to stay awake on the nicest of autumn afternoons. Casual napping was, at this point, more preferable to the frustrated man than attempting to write. He had studied the greats - Homer, Virgil, John Keats, John Milton, and even Martin Silenus - but simply could not produce a suitable epic.
It was a curious place to be - on the ground, amidst the damp leaves and rocks and oddly shaped roots. Shouldn't he be in some cafe? Drinking something with an altogether silly name, squinting through his horn-rimmed glasses, reading post-modern, cubist criticisms of world music? Crossing his leg at the knee, knees clad in courdoroy, with some obscure t-shit and hideous jacket to compliment? He liked it under the oak - it was his Muse, parading around like some gilded and bejeweled tree in a Byzantine court. Indeed it was a beacon to the people that passed by, and had even develped a proper name - "take a left at The Oak."
A sudden wind scattered his work like so many dead leaves swirling around the oak under which he sat. No matter, it was rubbish anyway. The poet spent hours, scribbling, searching for that perfect story of gods and giants, that exquisite dichotomy of good and evil, of war and peace. Inevitably he failed, and invariably, he tried again. This afternoon was no different, as there quite a few leaves, literal and literary, surrounding him. "Again," the wind seemed to say, sensing that his latest endeavor was unsuitable. This was a repeated theme in the poet's work - write, destroy, start over, write, destroy, start over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum - and the repetition had become obscene. Like some sort of sick martial art, literary violence that attacked his muse on every front, he struggled with meter, verse, rhyme, style, and, above all, subject. No matter, it was all rubbish anyway.
The day waned and the sky began to darken; however, there was no sunset, the sky obscured by a dark blanket of cloud-cover. Rather than find the ominous weather oppressive or smothering, the poet found it liberating. A single, swollen rain drop fell dramatically and landed just as the poet prepared to write the next word in his evenly metered and sufficiently acadmeic verse, and an otherwise absent light twinkled in the poet's eyes, as if from Heaven. At that precise moment, rain, pen, and paper combined in some lyrical Trinity.
The levy broke.
A deluge poured from the sky, as if Poseidon himself had come to watch the denouement of the ill-fated epic.
And he wrote.
Furiously, viciously, inspired, he wrote. Wet copy paper tore under the speed and ferocity of the poet's pen. Words appeared as if by magic, without the poet having any recollection of scribbling them down. Vagaries turned into ideas with lightning speed, and rhyme of all sorts - masculine, feminine, leonine - was sounded with laser precision. For hours he wrote, throwing completed pages to the side in his haste. Soon, it was finished. Wet, muddy paper surrounded the drenched man. He was chilled to the bone, wet and hungry, and his poem was in similar condition - in no way suitable for presentation, or even to be read. It did not matter - for once, it wasn't rubbish at all, and it was completed. The clouds parted as quickly as they came, like so many startled black birds, and Orion's belt shone brightly and proudly in the warm, humid night.
It was a curious place to be - on the ground, amidst the damp leaves and rocks and oddly shaped roots. Shouldn't he be in some cafe? Drinking something with an altogether silly name, squinting through his horn-rimmed glasses, reading post-modern, cubist criticisms of world music? Crossing his leg at the knee, knees clad in courdoroy, with some obscure t-shit and hideous jacket to compliment? He liked it under the oak - it was his Muse, parading around like some gilded and bejeweled tree in a Byzantine court. Indeed it was a beacon to the people that passed by, and had even develped a proper name - "take a left at The Oak."
A sudden wind scattered his work like so many dead leaves swirling around the oak under which he sat. No matter, it was rubbish anyway. The poet spent hours, scribbling, searching for that perfect story of gods and giants, that exquisite dichotomy of good and evil, of war and peace. Inevitably he failed, and invariably, he tried again. This afternoon was no different, as there quite a few leaves, literal and literary, surrounding him. "Again," the wind seemed to say, sensing that his latest endeavor was unsuitable. This was a repeated theme in the poet's work - write, destroy, start over, write, destroy, start over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum - and the repetition had become obscene. Like some sort of sick martial art, literary violence that attacked his muse on every front, he struggled with meter, verse, rhyme, style, and, above all, subject. No matter, it was all rubbish anyway.
The day waned and the sky began to darken; however, there was no sunset, the sky obscured by a dark blanket of cloud-cover. Rather than find the ominous weather oppressive or smothering, the poet found it liberating. A single, swollen rain drop fell dramatically and landed just as the poet prepared to write the next word in his evenly metered and sufficiently acadmeic verse, and an otherwise absent light twinkled in the poet's eyes, as if from Heaven. At that precise moment, rain, pen, and paper combined in some lyrical Trinity.
The levy broke.
A deluge poured from the sky, as if Poseidon himself had come to watch the denouement of the ill-fated epic.
And he wrote.
Furiously, viciously, inspired, he wrote. Wet copy paper tore under the speed and ferocity of the poet's pen. Words appeared as if by magic, without the poet having any recollection of scribbling them down. Vagaries turned into ideas with lightning speed, and rhyme of all sorts - masculine, feminine, leonine - was sounded with laser precision. For hours he wrote, throwing completed pages to the side in his haste. Soon, it was finished. Wet, muddy paper surrounded the drenched man. He was chilled to the bone, wet and hungry, and his poem was in similar condition - in no way suitable for presentation, or even to be read. It did not matter - for once, it wasn't rubbish at all, and it was completed. The clouds parted as quickly as they came, like so many startled black birds, and Orion's belt shone brightly and proudly in the warm, humid night.