The Animal

[JamesG]

Hi James,
a post-apocalypse piece? Okay then ...

Had you considered setting it in the present tense?

S1. You rather lost me with  ûrClouds, trying a bit too hard (it seemed to me.) And how can clouds be primitive? I had been assuming mushroom clouds but ...
Don't know what 'defeated by the sun' means.

Yes I definitely  think I need to lose the urClouds bit, it seems a bit redundant and pretentious to me now. As to mushroom coluds, not all apocalypses have to be nuclear...
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S2. This seems a more natural opening, though I'm not sure what the colour of the grains means (other than transformed in a nuclear blast) - and compared to the reduction from mountain to grain doesn't seem that dramatic. Perhaps some better adjectives

I will look at this as I made a number of different versions of this stanza and wasn't quite happy with any of them

S3. I don't think you need this (at least not the first five-seven lines of it)  You have 'concrete cliff' in the next verse which suggests a city anyway.

S4. Struggling with 'animal home' - it feels a bit flat.
Do you mean 'arced' rather than 'ached'?

I would agree about animal home. I did try lair but that didn't seem to work either. 
I did mean ached, meant as a form of yearning


S5. Wondered if, in the penultimate line you might change 'its eyes' to 'my eyes'?
Also, how can 'ribs' be 'hirsuite'? (Rather at odds with 'skin tattooed' isn't it? And how does one clasp a ring against one's ribs?)

I think that I was trying to get across a visual allusion to something starving, ribs showing through a hair covered chest.


The Animal.


The Animal stirs
and sieves. Cupping
a thousand grains
in its animal hand
grains that once were mountains,
now the colour of shellac,
rag, and bone

The Animal sits
looks seawards
at the smears
of grey and mauve
that mass at the horizon
like exhausted armies
defeated by the sun

The Animal rises
walks the path its made
its own, stares at the concrete cliff
And nods a greeting to itself,
A flock of splinters flushed
by its passing flies up, shattering
in a cry of russet and gold

The Animal. Closed and barred
Against the glow lies down
and stretches. its skin,
still tattooed by the last embers
of the light. Clasping a ring
of copper and gold
tight I close my eyes
against the night.

I do like this edit, and I think it works better than my original, although I don't think I would be comfortable using "my eyes" as I wanted it to have more of a imagined protagonist than a first person description, if you know what I mean. Thanks for the analysis though, much appreciated!


Best, Knot

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