WRITING: Stumped

With submissions opening up at several of my favorite literary journals, I’ve been working, working, working (translation: editing and revising and stabbing a brutally sharp knife into its bowels) on a story that’s close to being done. Close, but there’s that bitty itch or itchy bit that holds me back: the awkward phrase.

Who would wear his golden band and who would wield his hammer with its heft of smooth rubbed oak so fitting to his hand?  Curling photographs, a smiling group around a sandcastle on a beach where footprints long ago had washed away, would wash away themselves into a careless sea of random waves of light.  What would matter when his name had bleached whiter than his bones from lists of names he knew by heart, and he the only one still living.  And so he wrote in desperate scribbles on the barks of trees and in the air to drift across the continents where no one knew him longer than a moment’s pause, forgot him in a beat of time.

It’s the second sentence in particular that is giving me trouble. The entire story is written in this lyrical prose form–in fact, this is the story I’ve been complaining so loudly about and the one that I’ve switched to a poem-form though it doesn’t fit a sonnet, ode, or much else.  I’ve used the poetry form of it and woke up "Alex" (my Text to Speech Mac man) and he’s helped me a lot.  In hearing the meter and rhythm aloud–by someone other than myself reading it–I’ve stuck in some commas that help the prose form of the piece. Very likely using improper punctuation such as employing comma splicing but that’s not something I’m real concerned about.  What I don’t like in the above is the word choice and resulting halt of flow by "curling photographs, a smiling group around a sandcastle on a beach…"

The problem for me is that I see the image clearly and as its painter, am stuck in using blue when I should try adding some yellow in there; something that may change the whole nature of the meaning, and that’s what’s likely keeping me blind to the solution.

I refuse to allow myself to move on to another tale until this one’s told so back to the beginning once again, to see where I’ve gone wrong.