sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2024-04-14 06:55 pm

Some folktale I'm keeping alive while the curtain falls

My poem "A Long Time Afterward" has been accepted by Nightmare Magazine. It is a ghost poem whose subject was only ever alive on film: Johnny Ryan, played stone cold and queer to the bone by Wendell Corey in the deliriously Technicolor noir Desert Fury (1947). He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it. The day it was written, I read it for [personal profile] radiantfracture's birthday.

Today being my father's birthday actual, [personal profile] spatch and I walked around the reservoir before dinner.



There were numerous ducks and even some geese out on the water, but this older cygnet was the only visible swan. Not pictured: several approaches which were just swan butt.



My grandparents' house had a two-story pussy willow when my brother and I were growing up. The pussy willow in my parents' yard was grown from a cutting of it. This one was growing near the edge of the habitat garden where the gravel all washed down the spillway the first year it was built.



The camera had trouble with the rain-light, rendering my attempt to catch the thicketing of catkins against the sky even more experimentally than intended.



Backed by water. It had not yet begun to rain in earnest.



Of the numerous ducks, these dapper little sea ducks were the hardest to photograph, as they were so fast-moving that they tended to slide out of shot like planets down the plane of the ecliptic.



Pictured by Rob, this triple-headed stump looked like something mythological.



He caught the elegant curve of the rain-high brook.



As we made it back in the now steady rain, I stopped for the blue-shift glow in the grass.

I did not sleep at all last night due to massive allergies and spent most of my morning spot-cleaning and doing laundry while wheezing badly, but there were good things in the day.
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2024-04-15 01:17 am (UTC)(link)
I am glad you got that performance into a poem, and very happy it was taken.

Those are gorgeous pictures.

Nine
gwynnega: (Leslie Howard mswyrr)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2024-04-15 01:58 am (UTC)(link)
Congratulations on the poetry sale!
thawrecka: (Default)

[personal profile] thawrecka 2024-04-15 02:09 am (UTC)(link)
Congrats on the sale!
troisoiseaux: (Default)

[personal profile] troisoiseaux 2024-04-15 11:53 am (UTC)(link)
Congrats on the poem, and (belated) happy birthday to your father!
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2024-04-15 12:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Those look like buffleheads, but I'd have thought they were all headed back up north by now.

(Buffleheads always look to me like the Chanel blazers of ducks)
thisbluespirit: (Default)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2024-04-15 04:58 pm (UTC)(link)
Congrats on the poem! And also a swan!

Sorry about the lack of sleep. ♥
theseatheseatheopensea: Fernando Pessoa drinking in a Lisbon tavern. (Em flagrante delitro.)

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea 2024-04-15 07:02 pm (UTC)(link)
He haunts the end of the film and kept on haunting me past it.

This is very accurate! And now I hope that a lot of people will get to have this experience, thanks to your poem! <3
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)

[personal profile] yhlee 2024-04-16 07:39 am (UTC)(link)
Yay poem! hope you get sleep soon
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)

[personal profile] yhlee 2024-04-16 03:16 pm (UTC)(link)
I swear, the most underrated superpower is being able to fall asleep when you want to and get enough sleep/feel well-rested. My husband has this superpower and he's lucky I'm not a superpower vampire because I would siphon it out of him and send you half!!
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)

[personal profile] yhlee 2024-04-16 03:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Our running joke throughout college was that he's an Andromedan. We'd have dinner with Lev and Peter (two friends of ours), plus Joe and I, all banter-joking for about ten minutes at the beginning about Joe being an Andromedan as our ritual, and then we'd tuck in. :)
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2024-04-16 12:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Lovely, congrats!