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I got a girl in the war, Paul, her eyes are like champagne
I am supposed to finish two poems by tonight. I don't know if it can be done. I didn't sleep very much. The subjects are not difficult ones, which means I really don't want to knock something out with my eyes closed; I don't want to be facile. Anyway, I had to run a bunch of errands with my brother. This is what I wrote with a borrowed pen on the rental car receipt he had in his glove compartment, because I forgot my usual pad and pencil, but for God's sake I am not going to start taking my laptop to the grocery store. It's the equivalent of my brain doodling. I'm terrified it will be better than whatever poem I can actually make myself write.
He never built himself another wife, Hephaistos. The lame, shamed god, wedded to war's lover: I imagine him one of the boys in the back room, watching her dance with soldiers, as carelessly alluring as he finds it hard to get words around things instead of fire, wires, springs, wheels. This could be a war movie: the boffin whose beautiful wife is having it off with the military's golden boy and everyone knows it. He's an aircraft engineer if her lover is a flier; if he's regular army, then it's explosives or artillery. Either way, it's her husband's hard work that her lover takes to war. Being thrown off Olympos is like having one of your inventions blow up in your face, you're never quite sure what will set anything off ever again. You're safest in your workshop, where sparks or chemicals still aren't as volatile as people. It was an arranged marriage, mythologically. I hate love triangles, so maybe historical poly will save the day. There's no point in expecting monogamy from a goddess of desire. Or let's cut out the middleman: it's modern, Hephaistos a programmer or an artist (a welder), Aphrodite the soldier he's married. She goes off to war again and again while he worries, in love with the shock of adrenaline, drawn back to the battlefield away from their bed. I don't know the ending to this one. I don't know if there is one.
I am really extraordinarily tired.
He never built himself another wife, Hephaistos. The lame, shamed god, wedded to war's lover: I imagine him one of the boys in the back room, watching her dance with soldiers, as carelessly alluring as he finds it hard to get words around things instead of fire, wires, springs, wheels. This could be a war movie: the boffin whose beautiful wife is having it off with the military's golden boy and everyone knows it. He's an aircraft engineer if her lover is a flier; if he's regular army, then it's explosives or artillery. Either way, it's her husband's hard work that her lover takes to war. Being thrown off Olympos is like having one of your inventions blow up in your face, you're never quite sure what will set anything off ever again. You're safest in your workshop, where sparks or chemicals still aren't as volatile as people. It was an arranged marriage, mythologically. I hate love triangles, so maybe historical poly will save the day. There's no point in expecting monogamy from a goddess of desire. Or let's cut out the middleman: it's modern, Hephaistos a programmer or an artist (a welder), Aphrodite the soldier he's married. She goes off to war again and again while he worries, in love with the shock of adrenaline, drawn back to the battlefield away from their bed. I don't know the ending to this one. I don't know if there is one.
I am really extraordinarily tired.
no subject
I think the last idea is brilliant--Ares as metaphor, a metaphor gone all too concrete, Hephaistos sending his wife off to tryst with a lover made of adrenaline and steel and desperate camraderie, cuckolded not carnally but by carnage, Aphrodite a goddess of desire whose own chiefest desire is for the rattle of the guns and the reek of propellent and the song that the shells sing as they fly overhead.
I'm sorry you're tired, and I hope you can find rest soon. Good luck with the second poem--the first, assuming that's the one you're just after posting, is lovely.
PS