DOG PEOPLE
The Dog People
For many years of my life I was obsessed with a race of ‘dog people’, and sometimes they still visit me, although I’ve mostly written them out of me. They are not hybrids, but dogs – or maybe wolves – that acquired consciousness at some point in evolution, and bear the same relation to canines as humans do to apes. I have a mythological explanation for their awakening, as recorded in these stories. They are good and bad like all conscious creatures, but I think of them as wiser than us, more in tune with earth and with stronger sight reaching into a future which in their hands could be just and happy.
Queenbitch
Queenbitch is a matriarchal figure, a female who believes in the spiritual superiority of her gender and the rightness of sexual freedom. This is part II of her story, a sporadic diary she keeps over the long years at the ‘Navel’, the dog tribe’s city in the forest. Too much of part I, which recounts her youth in the doomed city of Cynopolis, is reworked in ‘The Yellow Tree’ for it to be worth repeating here.
Fragments of a Hero Myth
ONE DREAM
Morning breaks over the jungle,
the rising sun dissolves the mists,
framing momentary worlds
for someone’s eyes – for Elephant
on a height above the trees? for Kite
riding the currents of the dawn?
Surely for us.
DANCING GODS (a novel)
Note on the dancing gods
The Dancing Gods is a story or short novel I wrote mostly for fun at the time of Chavez’s first attempted coup d’état. Whether it has any connection to the politics of what has happened since in Venezuela, I leave to readers to decide. The spiritualist scenes are based on a real cult in this country, though I’ve imagined a lot there too. María Lionza is a force in the lives of many people.
CHILDREN’S POEMS
On the Road
The earth is very wide,
people few and scattered,
and a long road divides
goodbye from welcome.
The barefoot beggar,
the poor man with his donkey,
merchants on fine horses,
trace lines traveling
over the face of the earth,
and where they cross
eyes meet, words linger
on the air, marking
a moment’s society.
TREE POEMS
TREES
An astronaut in orbit
sees no singular growing things.
A body levitating
above the curve of earth
sees the mother of dreams –
forests are her hair; they stand
holding up multitudinous forks
to their father sun
and smaller woods and pockets
sprout on her mound of love
in her armpits
and on her dark woman’s lip.
TWO-MINUTE LIVES
Two-minute lives
I have lived.
I have lived in other peoples’ lives.
I have imagined lives.
Now I need to relive the most vivid of those lives, to remind myself of how alive I was, trapped as I feel in an old body and a disintegrating society, that limits me to routine actions and trite communication (however much kindness may also be involved). The future offers few possible openings and the certainty that looms is the end of everything for me.
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