mountain dragon

the great creature lumbered to the shore
dipped its head into the surf
and drank

took on water like a great ship
filling its lower decks
with ballast

the water surged and sloshed down the pipes
into the huge belly
along with fish and sand and shells
and the long thin stems of algae

for years, decades, centuries

its thirst satisfied at last
shaking from its craggy mouth
a sluice of icy water to either side

the mountain dragon
turned and bounded back into the hills
and settled down long enough to turn into stone

where now it rests happily
while we climb its fat legs
to the crest

asleep and dreaming it's 1944

asleep and the bird

has dug out her eye

asleep and her ankles

are round with the snow

asleep and the wind

cuts her hair with white scissors

time is a teardrop that slides down her chin

she has slept here before

                not again not again she is

                                croaking

the guns are still firing she is

buried in ashes and the wail

that goes out from the throat

of the sleeper is the sound

of a bird that has dug out her eye

is the sound of the wire

as it hums through her flesh

is the sound of the smoke 

             as it burns  as it burns 

                              as it burns

Sala in Refuge 2

"Is there some human whose name you would call in need?”  the man in the Welcome House asked. He looked levelly at her from between the folds of a robe that covered all but his eyes.

She had never seen one of the originals before, but Sala was not perturbed at all by the color of his eyes. She had seen golden eyes before -- also silver eyes, orange eyes, and purple. People in Sala’s world changed their eye color by injecting a lens. She knew, of course, that the golden-eyed man had not changed his eye color by injecting a lens. He was one of the Taliaw, and his skin was golden, too.

“No,” Sala replied. “No one.”

“Is there not a single human whose name you would call when in need?” the golden-eyed man, whose name was Yuye, asked again. His voice carried no inflection that in a human would tell her if he was impatient, which the words themselves seemed to convey.

“No,” Sala replied, as evenly as possible. “There is no one.”

Yuye took a deep breath and let it out slowly, all the while continuing to hold her eyes with his. She saw the folds of the robe gently moving with his breath.

“Then put your agreement,” he said, and nodded at the stretbark slice that he had assured her functioned like a fingerDroid.

She complied, clumsily, feeling foolish that her mark was surrounded by splatters from the marker that even now, lying flat on the desk, still dripped a blue fluid. She pulled the silken band from her neck and blotted the stretbark and the desk. "I'm sorry," she mumbled.

“Your cloth is damaged,” Yuye said.

“Yes, it is." She held the cloth loosely in her hand, not knowing what to do with it. "Where do I go now?” She would not look into the eyes of the golden man.

Yuye reached out and took Sala’s dirtied cloth in his hands, and Sala could see that his skin was smooth and electric. Her gaze was transfixed by the strangeness of Yuye’s hands. They were the hands of a saint, with five equally long tapering fingers. At the end of each finger a sharp claw was blunted with a supple transparent cap, and similarly blunted on each wrist was another claw that reminded Sala of the dewclaw of wolves. She watched, fascinated, as he sprayed the cloth from a small bottle, and transferred the ink to his hands and then, apparently, as he shook the cloth, to nonexistence. He folded the cloth carefully into a triangle and returned it to Sala, clean. He looked calmly into her eyes from within the folds of his robe. Sala could barely nod, which looked as if she thought that such a kindness, such seeming magic, happened every day for her. She put the cloth into her pocket and swallowed.

“It is a requirement that you explain your need for refuge,” Yuye said in a voice that to Sala seemed resonant with kindness. “Someone will come to speak with you. Return now to the entry room.”

Sala left the small neat office of the man called Yuye, and sat down on a creaky chair. She waited, staring at her own hands, rough and worn, her nails ragged.

Yuye picked up the document and looked at it. The Welcome House was empty before but now it was filled up with Sala. He did not need to look to remember Sala’s even brown skin and her deep angry eyes that said how much she had suffered and how much she would protect herself. Nor did he need to look to know how very different Sala seemed from other humans he had met. How very strong in will and mind. How very determined to be left alone.

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.



______

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