Writing Practice - Circles 15 minutes

The writing topic from red Ravine is currently “circles.” What follows is a gently edited selection from my 15 minute writing practice guided by that prompt. I eliminated some of the debris that would be onerous for reader to sift through but I left the transitionless oddities that tend to emerge from this kind of exercise.

As I considered the idea of circles, my mind kept returning to the video I saw over at Repository of Riparian Goodness: the delicate scuplture crafted from the temporary and hanging from a tree branch like a curtain with a hole in the center. As the artist, Andy Goldsworthy, talked about the process of constructing these pieces, he said, When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse. That sentence and the fragile net of twigs, the absent center, have lingered in my thoughts.

Circles

Tilting into the wind, an absence sculpted from twigs and detritus at the edge of its collapse. Naught, the slipped knot, frame of a gape in space, a way to focus.  Listen: the dark rustles in the patch where the crocuses will be when we return to spring.

Telling stories at the bonfire, the stone circle where shadows work their way in like a needle works the cloth, embroider darkness into the light. Your iris is a perfect circle but you are not.

He had cigarette burns in his forearm: two circles and one arc, a smiley face.  I never knew which face to look into, which to look away from.

A weeping willow aspires to stir the wind in circles and achieves ellipses. I’m a circle but I’d rather be a fractal or a sphere.