so wrought, so rotten

My second play, slightly less short, finished!  I present to you:  The Climb.

This one originated out of a desire to write a group discussion.  Most of my experience writing characters talking is limited to back-and-forth dialogue, but there's something really fun about conversations between more than two people that I like to explore.  Of course, it's also great fun to write characters who seem to share a mind.  There's a certain punch inherent in characters speaking in unison without prompting.

Also, if I manage to write a play that isn't dripping with death, you should probably check up on me, because it might mean there is something terribly wrong.  For now, we're par for the course!

I'm going to a wedding tomorrow, and the rehearsal for it tonight.  It's been a pretty wedding-ful summer so far, but this is the last one this year.  How many weddings will I attend next year, I wonder?

I came across a poem the other day, and I'd like to share it with you here.  Enjoy!

Writing an Elegy

BY RICKEY LAURENTIIS

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s

black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped,

his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away.

             If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her;

if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing   ...    

             This is what I see: the Spanish moss

as convicted to its branches — gray, colonial,

but in my century now, suspended so close each vein might well be a whole, hanging

fiction of my mind. The moss

             is a fiction of my mind: a screen, swinging

on its gothic hinges, making the light fussier as it swags, giving not just the trees

but my idea of them a Medusa look. That man,

            I think, had wanted to feed something in himself

not worth feeding, had founded a world on it — 

                                                                                                     What is it

my mind wants to get at, always extending, hungering, looking

back, always tearing open again its own modernity,

as if each thought is more than the little present

moment it sounds like, but, raised at an angle, piercing me, having me imagine,

to build such antique violences in my head, it is a thorn? This moss

has been growing for ages now, can do nothing

but snag and grow   ...    What is it the mind won’t

unsee, beautiful flaw? In another version, the woman dies

and her husband

braids her hair

through the trees.