Carved from Memory: Prose Poem

Prompt response: liminal landscapes

I will be perfect when she’s freed me, exposed me, made me —

She has no model for this, no perfect man but what she sees in her mind. For now, I am lost in this sparsely-peopled, heavily-wooded, rock-strewn land. For now, I am held between the space of air, and claustrophobia — dirt and pressure, gravity and heat — for now.

For now, I am something like stone. Some mad dream tugs at me, though, some sense that soon my fingers will move, my eyes open onto hers, legs stretch towards her — her bed, her life, her arms.

I will be…

Whatever I am now, not that afterwards— she holds the hammer, the chisel, the hands and the heart for this. And in transformation, what part of what I am now comes with me? No, nothing, no part of that — just a new life. A complete shift. And she is carving me from memory.

I will be a standout from this morass of life and lies and pretend loves — I will be smooth. Perfection. When she’s done with this coarse body, with all the flaws and flecks of this stone through which only she can see –

Me, I will —

Become a man standing complete beside her — and in her and with her. Wrapped in the constancy of becoming and not simply a static block. I will walk and be walked, sleep and wake. I will be…prayer? Answered and not. Not just this idea lingering in the intangible.

I will be perfect, when she’s done with me.

J.D. Harms 2022

Written in response to another stellar prompt by Melissa Coffey. You all know how much I, and my co-editor, adore myth and mythologies. Here, I used a reversal of roles to explore the Pygmalion and Galatea myth, attempting to reorient the message. Instead of, as Eleanore Christine notes in her piece, “Shatter”, perpetuating patriarchal themes of how men can depict (and even own the masculine idea of) the “perfect” woman, I’ve given the role of sculptor to the woman; the man as the yet-to-be-created.

I thought it was an interesting place to work with the idea of liminality: a statue in stone form, waiting for his creatrix to come and release the idea of what he’ll be. Of course, my own gender informs my ruminations/understanding of what might be going through the stone’s “mind” as he waits to be revealed.

So grateful, as always, for all the beautiful inspiration that Melissa conjures, for her editorial comments, and also for her suggestion that I write this from the sculpture’s point of view: