Fragments

Alhambra

paradise
a garden with running water
water in a dry land

it calls to us,
beckons alluringly,
sooths the soul
the sound of water
the scent of rain
aridness constrained
water in a dry land

castle on a hill
bastion opposing heat and sun
the edge of civilization
triumph in time, over time
pools, fountains,
senses willingly beguiled
paradise
water in a dry land

so you have been to me
water in a dry land

anne duncan (Aug '05)

Phoenix

the sky is burning

anne duncan (Aug '05)

Conjunctive Points

The intersections of our lives. Some lives intersect along whole surfaces. They blend together in seamless arcs and pleasing forms. Point and counterpoint in rhythm with each other, not conjoined, but blended, a symmetry, a balance achieved, comfort. Some lives merge together, run hand in hand with each other. They merge and enhance becoming larger entities, edifices, cathedrals one might say. The merging together of lives to create something understandable, coherent, perceptible, a unity, a shaped space. But our lives, the complex geometries of ourselves intersect irascibly, conjunctive points in an imperceptible structure whose purpose, meaning or ultimate form surpasses our cognition. Occasions of connection that lead not rhythmically onward nor to some larger purpose. Occasions which neither preclude nor predestinate some future connection....

anne duncan (Mar '05)

Hallowed Halls

The ivy crept over the house, a green plague, relentless. The house, that human construct lay beneath, consumed. Some looking would call it quaint, ivy covered halls, hallowed halls. I called it death, a slow strangulation, a suffocation within the leafy legion. Its progression was incremental, measured in inches, brick by brick, one crumbled mortar joint at a time, a progression if not quite sapient, then certainly malevolent in its indifference....

anne duncan (Jan '05)

Fallow

the ills of marriage, but none of the fruit the mundane, the insipid, the better left unsaid tenderness, intimacy, joy threadbare in the tedium of being better to lie fallow to await another season

anne duncan (Dec '04)

Gone

She is gone, the one you wanted, that effervescent blythe spirit. I buried her, walled her off, it is the same. I built the wall myself, mixed the mortar, carefully laid the brick. Silence. I cursed you both as the mortar dried. The housewife remains....

anne duncan (Dec '04)

Love Songs (2)

Her own dreams were tame. She had domesticated them long ago and eventually she noticed that they were just gone, dried husks of themselves that she must have swept out unnoticing one day.

anne duncan (Mar '04)

Love Songs

Perfumed in moonlight and rain she approached. "Come, waltz with me" she whispered and her breath trailed like warm silk across my skin.

anne duncan (Mar '04)

Data Has No Right to Integrity

Data has no right to "integrity" independent of our human interest, however individually or collectively we may care to negotiate that.

rri (Jan '04)

a gift

A single grain would have sufficed. As the last grains trickled through her fingers she perceived the mystery hidden in the broken glass.

anne duncan (Jan '04)

Malificent

It was my prerogative and I let it pass, as if it were of no greater essence than the mist, thinking it no more than a lost dream and forgetting it was no less.

anne duncan (Nov '03)

A Village

He sat by the side of the school, waiting. He and the clusters of other students that milled around, some raucous, some aimless, some like him carefully timing their entry into the line of students waiting for a parent to pick them up. He had learned to time the line. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes he failed miserably. Even when he was very young, he had known which parents he liked, and which he did not. By the time he was ten, he had begun to try to get picked up by the parents he preferred. Now, he had been watching the patterns for years. He could feel the flow of them. He had his favorite parents. He knew if he timed it right, he could spot the car of a parent he liked as it rounded the turn coming up to the school. He had to keep track of the...

anne duncan (Oct '03)