These two clouds are giant dragons- heavy, dark bellied, and fast. They sit on the world. They hasten toward each other, dragging their mile long bodies through the sky. They shake their legs and shed unwanted scales which land on the ground at my feet, wetting the path with small, inconsistent droplets.
The sun is straining against these monsters, trying to let its light shine on the world a little longer, trying not to get jostled below the horizon by things it should be able to control. The dragon, realizing Helios’s weakness, slams into the sun again and again. Helios’s white glow illumines the beast in protest and tries to give battle. But the dragon pushes on, relentlessly, toward its friend and their home in the garden of the Hesperides.
Helios succumbs to the power of these Titans, and slips behind their black bellies, his white light winks, and fizzles, abandoning me to Boreas’s chill wind and the twilight of the Hesperides.
Naiads gurgle in the canal behind me, displeased by the cold. Their long tangles of soft green hair float carelessly behind them, strung along by the black current. Ducks float along, trying not to tangle their webbed feet in the algae. Three of them waddle out of the canal, two mallards and a regal lady who doesn’t belong in these waters. There’s not a feather out of place. Each of her latte brown feathers lies smoothly against her plump body. A few streaks of pure white feathers highlight her curves. She stands apart from the mallards and watches them in their menial labor. This must be a Naiad, she’s too beautiful to be anything else. She eyes me and waddles a little further away. Perhaps she knows I’ve discovered her secret. But she’s not concerned about me, she is above such things.
You make the world such a mystical place! It's been awhile since I studied Greek mythology. I had to look up a bunch of these characters. The sky is a battleground, and a duck is the creature of legends. Very beautiful.
ReplyDeleteA surprising and lovely treatment of the material of your visit this week (though I also admit I needed to brush up on my mythology).
ReplyDeleteLove these images of clouds as dragons sitting on the world. I also love the way you and the female duck connect...you've really filled this scene with a lot of personality.
ReplyDeleteSuch an interesting way to look at a place. It is amazing how mythology holds "true" over thousands of years. Today we can see the stories play out on the earth and in the sky just as ancients did. Talk about taking a long-focus lens to your subject matter! Thanks for sharing this interesting perspective!
ReplyDeleteGreat thoughts! I love the imagery you have here. I like to make the real world much more fantastic than it is, and this is such a fun way to view the clouds and the sky. Kudos!
ReplyDeleteWow! I love the way you've written about place in this post. It's interesting that you've used mythology to anthropomorphize the nature you are in. I think this is an instance in which the anthropomorphization (whew-- long word!) works, but maybe because I am biased and in love with mythology. I mentioned to Aimee on one of her posts that we humans often see how nature parallels our own psyche. I think that using the ideas of Helios, Zephyr, Naiads, and the like adds a lot of subtext to your treatment of this location. Beautiful!
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