Sala in Refuge 1

It was early spring when Sala came to the Sanctum, fleeing herself and her house in the human settlement. Her friends called it a location cure, doubting that leaving a house would rid one’s mind of pain. And of course they were right, though they did little to discourage her. The reservation known as Sanctum was a refuge for all.

Yuye remembers that Sala came into the Welcome House with her big box of freshly-printed codices, a cloth band around her neck made from Gordon silk and an anger so huge it was like a wide-mouthed Salixeum closing for a kill. She had brought an extra pair of shoes and a bandage kit and an image of her late mother bound in a faux bone frame.  

Sala remembers how the PackHorse engine had coughed ever so delicately just before it quit. Desert rats had made a home among the wheel parts during all the days she had paced in her house refusing to go anywhere. The warm engine had invited them further in and they had died and choked it beyond repair. It mattered little. Once inside Sanctum, machinery would be useless. Still, she was glad that the old PackHorse, one of the oldest vehicles in the settlement, had lasted long enough.

Sala remembers entering the door of the Welcome House dragging her big box of possessions on a sled. The empty whiteness of the room, the golden man standing before her are rich and vivid in her mind.



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Generative writing

The UA Poetry Center is offering a class on generative writing, a term that was new to me. After I explored further, taking a look at generative writing exercises on a couple of sites online, I was reminded of a poem I wrote in the early '80s, Man on the Pushdown Stack, about the murder of a man who was a well-known American Baha'i. The pushdown stack was a concept I was learning in a database class I was taking at Temple University at the time. I'll post the poem if I can find it. It's in a box somewhere.

the old city

The old city of Taliewen crowds the shores of the Odiferous Ocean, an ocean full of fearful and dangerous creatures and volcanic islands made of massive rocks with rigid skirts of stone.

There are other human settlements on the planet, each originating from the old city. These have grown to be new cities, each with their own outcast settlements, some of them full of artists and some of them full of craftsmen, and some of them surrounded by those wishing to live as their deep ancestors did millennia ago, having brought old ways and old beliefs with them to the new frontier.

And inland, there are rich forests, highly cultivated fields, and beyond the mountains, a valley that is given over to desert. Beyond the desert valley, further than the reach of human settlements of any kind, is the enclave of the original inhabitants of the planet, the Taliaw. They do not interfere with the doings of the humans, and the humans learned long ago that against the originals there is nothing that can be done. But some humans live among them, refugees who can no longer live among their own people. 

spider

the little insects tapping on my skin
do not exist
nor do the Perseids dropping outside
my window
at 3 AM
nor does the three-headed hydra
of headlights on the incoming plane
over Tucson in the bright afternoon
in silence
appear to anyone but me
in my car heading west without my camera

is this what aging is?
the shiver of DNA strands
as they struggle
to keep me alive
sending phantoms to my synapses?

I imagine them
collapsing gently, floating
like the disconnected silks
of the spider's web as I tear it down

death may be the absence
of the waiting spider
standing by to build anew
another perfect web