a scattering at fased

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;/ she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her./ I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers/ to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark/ her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)/ She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.
C K Williams, On the Metro

The romance of the desert has dimmed a bit, somewhere between the abandoned wood sheds, the new concrete, the 4WDs and the cell phones that never stop ringing over the sands. Even a bedu thinks jumping on a camel in the 50 degree heat is a bit silly – instead, you’re more likely to find the animals in their pens, kept for milk, meat and old time’s sake.

Hashman, barely large enough to be a called a village, is perhaps best viewed as a metaphor instead. A few decades ago, there wasn’t any Hashman at all – just a general direction where you might find the occasional scattering of Bedouin tents. “This area was called Fased in the old days,” say the brothers. “But there was no permanent source of water here. We only stayed because the camel grazing was good when the rains came. We had to ride for eight days to the water, which was good in Habrut, but salty in Bimbilla.”

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