#Copper Round Gutters

[adams-gutter-cleaning]

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[arnavjohnson]

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[aplaceonthisworld]

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[adoringgreys]

Detroit Fiberboard

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[paintinghippos]

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[jamesmdavisson]

Tile in Santa Barbara

[xfairydrawing]

Exterior Stone

[hopestrope]

Rhaenys Targaryen, The Queen that Should Have Been

"Rook’s Rest was Ser Criston’s next objective. Forewarned of their coming, Lord Staunton closed his gates and defied the attackers. Behind his walls, his lordship could only watch as his fields and woods and villages were burned, his sheep and cattle and smallfolk put to the sword. When provisions inside the castle began to run low, he dispatched a raven to Dragonstone, pleading for succor...

Here Mushroom’s version seems most likely, for we know that nine days after Lord Staunton dispatched his plea for help, the sound of leathern wings was heard across the sea, and the dragon Meleys appeared above Rook’s Rest. The Red Queen, she was called, for the scarlet scales that covered her. The membranes of her wings were pink, her crest, horns, and claws bright as copper. And on her back, in steel and copper armor that flashed in the sun, rode Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was.

Ser Criston Cole was not dismayed. Aegon’s Hand had expected this, counted on it. Drums beat out a command, and archers rushed forward, longbowmen and crossbowmen both, filling the air with arrows and quarrels. Scorpions were cranked upward to loose iron bolts of the sort that had once felled Meraxes in Dorne. Meleys suffered a score of hits, but the arrows only served to make her angry. She swept down, spitting fire to right and left. Knights burned in their saddles as the hair and hide and harness of their horses went up in flames. Men-at-arms dropped their spears and scattered. Some tried to hide behind their shields, but neither oak nor iron could withstand dragon’s breath. Ser Criston sat on his white horse shouting, “Aim for the rider,” through the smoke and flame. Meleys roared, smoke swirling from her nostrils, a stallion kicking in her jaws as tongues of fire engulfed him.

Then came an answering roar. Two more winged shapes appeared: the king astride Sunfyre the Golden, and his brother Aemond upon Vhagar. Criston Cole had sprung his trap, and Rhaenys had come snatching at the bait. Now the teeth closed round her.

Princess Rhaenys made no attempt to flee. With a glad cry and a crack of her whip, she turned Meleys toward the foe. Against Vhagar alone she might have had some chance, but against Vhagar and Sunfyre together, doom was certain. The dragons met violently a thousand feet above the field of battle, as balls of fire burst and blossomed, so bright that men swore later that the sky was full of suns. The crimson jaws of Meleys closed round Sunfyre’s golden neck for a moment, till Vhagar fell upon them from above. All three beasts went spinning toward the ground. They struck the ground so hard that stones fell from the battlements of Rook’s Rest half a league away.

Those closest to the dragons did not live to tell the tale. Those farther off could not see for the flame and smoke. It was hours before the fires guttered out. But from those ashes, only Vhagar rose unharmed. Meleys was dead, broken by the fall and ripped to pieces upon the ground. And Sunfyre, that splendid golden beast, had one wing half torn from his body, whilst his royal rider had suffered broken ribs, a broken hip, and burns that covered half his body. His left arm was the worst. The dragonflame had burned so hot that the king’s armor had melted into his flesh.

A body believed to be Rhaenys Targaryen was later found beside the carcass of her dragon, but it was so blackened that no one could be sure it was her. Beloved daughter of Lady Jocelyn Baratheon and Prince Aemon Targaryen, faithful wife to Lord Corlys Velaryon, mother and grandmother, the Queen Who Never Was lived fearlessly, and died amidst blood and fire. She was fifty-five years old."

-Fire and Blood, George R.R. Martin

(Arts by Vak Phoenix, Jordi Gonzalez Escamilla, Douglas Wheatley, fkadaenerys)

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[garden-ghoul]

Happy Gushiwensday Shabbes! Tonight we have two weeks' worth of poem for you, the hefty "Changping Arrowhead Song" of Li He!

The artist's brush paints the Redwater sands in ash and powdered bone while the murky old blood in the soil seeds copper flowers. The gleaming gold white-feathered shafts are long eaten away by the rain and my search finds only broken wolf's teeth still standing upright in the ground. I search the field so long my horse is exhausted; I must ride the other east from the relay station, over rocky fields, to the old wall drowned under wormwood. The wind is ceaseless, the sun's warmth brief, and the stars are dull. Black flags of wet cloud hang in the air and render day night. Souls on one side, spirits on the other, wailing from mouths of wasted flesh--- I promise them an offering of fermented milk and roast mutton when I'm done. For now I search: a wild goose writhing with worms, blighted reeds and bamboo shoots. The wind rises to see off its visitor and my little fire gutters in fear. An ocean overflows my eyes. I search, and find a snapped-off arrowhead. The fractured point is crazed with red, that once cut clean through flesh. A child comes riding south along the old east wall of the city telling me to change my gold for a bamboo shaft.

Plenty of notes and original text under the cut.

长平箭头歌

漆灰骨末丹水沙，凄凄古血生铜花。 白翎金竿雨中尽，直余三脊残狼牙。 我寻平原乘两马，驿东石田蒿坞下。 风长日短星萧萧，黑旗云湿悬空夜。 左魂右魄啼肌瘦，酪瓶倒尽将羊炙。 虫栖雁病芦笋红，回风送客吹阴火。 访古丸澜收断镞，折锋赤璺曾刲肉�� 南陌东城马上儿，劝我将金换簝竹。

This one was kind of a lot! As with a lot of Li He's work I prioritized atmosphere, and taking a little longer to finish it let me also do some stuff with nonliteral translations + consonance and mouthfeel. I also did some maybe slightly awkward stuff to ensure that I could get the word "search" in every pair of stanzas to kind of underline that the poet is here aaaaall day long. Here are my notes.

The artist's brush --- this first line has a LOT of words that suggest paint or pigment! 漆 paint 灰 ash or lime 末 powder 丹 cinnabar and 沙 powder again (sand in this case). To me it suggested mixing pigments on a palette, except the pigments are poison ash and bone dust.

Redwater --- it's just called the Cinnabar River (in Shanxi), but I thought "Redwater sands" sounded very nice.

broken wolf's teeth --- Li He goes into more detail about why they're like wolf's teeth; they're serrated! The literal line is a fairly dry description of arrowhead morphology.

drowned under wormwood --- it doesn't say "drowned under" it just says there's wormwood/mugwort growing there, but its habit seems drownsome and I'm goth.

and render day night --- arguably it just says "in the night air" but when I thought about it it didn't make a ton of sense that he would be looking for relics on the battlefield at night so I decided it's a very overcast day.

Souls... spirits --- 魂 is an immortal soul and 魄 is a mortal soul. I'm not an expert on the distinction but it sounds pretty gnarly on the ghost plane around here.

I promise them an offering --- it's not outright stated but heavily implied that this is a food offering for the emaciated dead who haven't received offerings in centuries because their bodies weren't recovered by family.

my little fire gutters in fear --- I'm not super sure about this one. It literally says 吹阴火 blow yin fire, and I don't know how to interpret "yin" here. Laurence had yin fire as "ghost fire" which is cool. I'm playing more in the space of yin as darkness or diminishing, but not in a way that's, like, grammatical.

An ocean overflows my eyes --- 丸澜 is a fun idiom for crying, consisting of 丸 round things [tears] and 澜 swelling water.

crazed with red --- this one puzzles me. We think it's more likely the arrowheads are bronze (maybe the 'copper flowers' mentioned above), not steel, so they wouldn't be rusting, and the red is 璺 cracks, not just dried blood. Maybe blood that has the appearance of cracks? I chose a somewhat nonliteral word for this reason.

change my gold --- otherwise known as "buying." I think the reason he didn't just say "buy" was probably metrical, but I feel like the exchange is kind of striking and wanted to draw attention to it; it has something to say about tourism, the commodification of emotion. It's a pretty striking end for this poem wherein the poet has spent hours listlessly haunting the battlefield with the rest of the ghosts, weeping, and now a kid is trying to sell him souvenirs.

bamboo shaft --- there's some debate about the identity of the souvenirs: are they arrowshafts, or are they offering plates for temple sacrifices of meat? I chose to go with arrowshafts because it feels more... kitschy and pointless.

[ariadnew]

CTJL 2021, ROUND 7: PARIS

Archie had lived in Paris once, when he was eighteen. He and three of his closest mates, newly graduated, living out of a predictably small, predictably bohemian apartment in Montmartre while they spent the summer making pocket money teaching English to French kids and exploring their newfound adult freedom to the fullest extent they dared. 

All of this is, naturally, entirely new information to Dot.

Much to her delight, he continues on the Metro. One of his best friends, he tells her, got a job peeling vegetables and washing dishes at a restaurant governed by an Escoffier-trained chef, just to line his pockets. He fell wickedly and firmly in love with the world of the kitchen that summer. They barely saw him. He’s a sous-chef at one of London’s swankiest hotels now. And they still barely see him. Another spent those months honing his already prodigious talent for the social. Their apartment, he relates with a smile that is half-nostalgic, half-bashful, was frequently stuffed to the brim with strangers and friends alike; people found in clubs, markets, parks, cafes, galleries, streets; artists, actors, dancers, dreamers, and anything in between. On particularly notable occasions, their guests included a thalassophobic carcinologist, a Viennese piano technician, a professor of film studies, a diplomat’s (alleged) former mistress, and a fascinatingly cheerful mortician. Mostly, however, he recalls women. Lyndsay had a new girl on his arm every time they saw him, it seemed. Sometimes two. Sometimes two on each arm. Two on each arm, and a few in tow for his single friends. He was- by his own testimony- “unerringly generous” in that regard.

– But those, Archie says, as abrupt as the gentle appearance of colour in his cheeks, are stories for another time. His tone and his haste to depart the Metro tell her that another time is likely code for never. 

* It is to Montmartre he is taking them that morning, to a small cafe tucked between a fromagerie and a shop crammed as ambitiously as it precariously with ceramics. It’s a street of vibrancy, filled with colour and quirkiness and life. Awnings flutter bright against the grey Parisian sky; the numbing autumn air is tinted with the warm, wheaten smell of a busy bakery. They pass a record store painted red and a glacier in shades of orange and ice; beneath signs announcing costumières in flamboyant strokes and bric-à-brac with scraps of rusted metal. Tables and chairs are arranged dutifully outside eateries and are occupied by equally dutiful locals taking their morning coffee and smoking in the drizzle. The gutter underfoot trickles and glistens with overnight rain, crumpled with sodden copper leaves and cigarette butts. A middle-aged man looks away in a display of feigned ignorance while the Bull Terrier at the end of his lead hunches over the pavement. A woman in a long skirt flies by on a bicycle hurling words Dot doesn’t understand but cannot possibly be complimentary. A leaf flutters to the pavement; a distant horn blares. Weak morning light gleams in the wet of the cobbled road.

Agatha has agreed to join them for breakfast, though it is not because she has any real desire for their company.

She has taken the seat to Dot’s right, where she currently sits tall and aloof and dabbing a stray rain drop from her cheek with her sleeve, eyeing the eclectic decor and commenting on the oddly tart-sweet smell of baked, borderline-burned apricots. Clad in stiletto boots and an elegant designer coat that’d cover Dot’s rent for the next five months, she does not look like a woman who frequented colourful cafes squashed within a city’s most offbeat streets and ate crooked, bleeding pastries for breakfast. She looks like a woman who’d be more at home dining in the Four Seasons’ breakfast room, or at one of those famed Belle Epoque brasseries Dot read about in a tourist guide, one of green glasswork and gold and all things art nouveau, with prices as impossible as its waiting list. She imagines her briefly, the heroine of some Jazz Age novel, svelte and sparkling in an evening gown and elbow-length gloves with a cigarette holder perched in a languid, elegant hand; smoking Turkish cigarettes and listening to jazz while men in sharp suits and dapper haircuts line up to bring her expensive champagne and beget her elusive attention. It is not an altogether difficult image to conjure. But Agatha is not at the Four Seasons, nor at one of the most coveted tables among the city’s brasseries (nor, indeed, in another time period). Agatha is here, looking as out of place as a Vermeer hanging in a kindergarten classroom—

And she is here, it turns out, because this is not her first time in Paris. 

Parisians, she has found, are frequently afflicted with sudden and violent bouts of amnesia where the English language is concerned. Manners, too. Thus, a companion fluent in the language whilst in the capital is an incomparable advantage. How convenient it is, then, that Archie– as he has frequently reminded them over the course of their stay– is able to speak the language fluently! It also happens that he is in possession of an unnatural amount of patience, and- even more convenient!- is already on her payroll. Why wouldn’t she take advantage of that? Agatha isn’t in the mood to handle Parisian attitude. True, she isn’t really in the mood to handle English attitude, either, but the devil you know and all that. He might as well work for his wage. Make himself useful. Be worth the trouble. For once. 

It is for this reason alone she has deigned to keep Archie around, even if the cost is having to endure a morning of him flaunting his irritatingly good French, being irritatingly nonchalant about how irritatingly good it is, and being around Archie in general.

Dot knows this, because Agatha has just finished telling her. 

Archie must also know this, because she has not waited for him to leave after handing him a fistful of euros and telling him to order for her. Now. Please. (It makes him go away faster, she’d explained) (again, right in front of him)

Archie looks at Dot, the picture of sangfroid, and holds up Agatha’s euros.

‘Care to join me, Dottie?’ His tone is cool and smooth as the inside of a luxury car; his eyes spark with hidden humour. ‘Order what you like; Agatha’s just offered us our breakfast today. Awfully generous of her.’ ‘I put up w-’ ‘Awfully generous indeed.’ Agatha lowers her phone and looks Dot square in the eye. Having been in her employ longer and more closely than most, one would think she’d have grown accustomed to the unnerving, burning darkness of her mistress’ eyes.

She has not. (... If anything, it’d only gotten scarier)

‘Go with him, Dot.’ Agatha turns her eyes back to her phone, her voice low and bored. ‘And make sure you take your time.’

If Archie is similarly unnerved, he doesn’t show it. He meets Dot’s eye, flashes her a smile, and gestures with a sweep of his arm toward the register, as unconcerned and cheerful as ever.

* Part II of angry breakfast tomorrow. 👉 😎 👉

[blueprint-poetry]

the night i took my life (back)

I died to get out.

Here we are, they’re all standing in a semi-circle gathered ’round, sharing good memories with a good laugh full of tears and I’m all choked up six feet underground, buried beneath the weight of all our worst fears. I couldn’t find any way out, so I pled til I ran dry, veins cleaning out the gutters of my cobweb mind. It never mattered until now. I just couldn’t get out.

The horizon dipped below the sensory deprivation that held my head under the white noise. I heard every word they ever had to say but never the ones I needed. Tell me you love me no matter how far I go, then set out to prove it. I need to put stock in something solid to stand on, cause I cannot walk on troubled waters rising over every bridge I wanted to cross. There was no crossing.

And you cannot stand at my grave and wish to turn back the days and hold me once more just to say, “I love you beyond any darkness that comes, I am not afraid. And show every part that undid you, and it’s okay if it has destroyed you. I am on your side, I will only come running in and open my heart to pour mine in to all these cracks I swear you do not have to hide again.” So we’ll think back and regret how it ever came to this, cause I’ve been lying here just dying here to get out.

The only way out is through, but I’m through. But not in the way an optimist would say, I’m just turning the phrase from beyond the grave of my wandering mind, while they circle the wagons and mourn their beating hearts alive. Why am I the one to cry? They’ve got such a hold on me. I’m watching them burn but I burned too bright, it took all the love away from me. While theirs, theirs will warm them as mine warns them and something good will come of me at last. They’ll learn to love a little purer as the snuff gets burned off.

I’m watching from beyond, they’re receiving with grief that which will break their marrows down where all the shattered places in me cut so very deep. I cut so very deep, there was no turning back tonight. I felt euphoric release perfectly weighted to the disappointing flavor that filled my mouth with copper. What an ironic twist of fate condemning the things that never were. The horizon was before my watery eyes but I was blind tonight, losing sight and with no senses to guide me; all my sensibilities led me astray.

And they’ll fall on their knees and rise again, wipe the grit and grime and grief from their eyes. Tell my favourite story one more time and just tell me you love me tonight. They hold a champagne glass aloft and toast to the life now gone to a past we cannot get back, we must go forward.

I only wanted to go forward.

So remember this at my wake- ning, a portrait of this past me. And pass me the glass, I want to use it for something different tonight. Toast to a life now gone and cast me into oblivion and a new relief, that I might finally lay me to rest and rise renewed. And maybe we see the horizon or maybe we don’t, but either way, my life is worth living simply because it is mine.

I’m dying to get out. This is the night I took my life back.

—blueprint poetry

[the-tharns-speak]

Greetings, Lord Chancellor. I hope your work is going well. I came to ask a traditional little question. Given the fact that the sewers of the Imperial City head straight to the lake which, I take it, also serves as the main fresh water supply, I can't do anything but ask if there is some sort of a spell or construction you use to turn this water into something clean and safe enough to drink.

My understanding of civic engineering is, admittedly, just covering the basics, so I can’t really delve into the details, but there are two main factors here: First, the lake springs are located in the northern part of the lake and from there water is pumped into the city, while the sewers’ output is either to the south  or towards the centre.

Secondly, the underground aquaduct and water reservoir hold a variety of filters (I suppose non-magicals), which clear the water for most of the part, so you don’t find dead rats or leaves going through the plumbing. Mind you, for maintenance reasons, this plumbing is still accessible from the sewers; apparently you can’t take down a forest without sending some splinters flying.

Thirdly - yes, I know that I said there are two factors, now there is a third one, keep up - collecting and purifying rainwater eases the burden more. Naturally, everyone knows that rainwater  which comes from the clean skies is healthier than lakewater into which slaughterfish piss, mudcrabs shit, and what the eels do is better not to speak about. I think that at this point some sewage in the lake is a lost argument if people are still willing to drink that unfiltered.

Allow me to share with you a joke on the Empire that went around when I was just a little boy and makes rounds even until nowadays: “All the Empire’s gold is in the Emperor’s treasury. All the Empire’s silver is in the Divines’ cathedrals. All the Empire’s copper is in the gutters.”