Symbiotic Symbol

Symbiotic Symbol

Great things come of all relation,

patient as the coastline with its waves,

sure as leaf edges, quantum and the clouds.

We puzzled out a part for sitting down together and having some food,

cleaning up before and after- heavy as sleep.

Along the way characters or people as children and relations emerge,

speaking naturally and in our own language.

Time honored.

Time decimated

but some here to read or say, “I get it”.

We move on.

Tiger of the night with tongue tucked between her fangs,

pregnancy and hunger

mix messages of abdomen and urgency.

Carry us with you little DNA package, little mouse,

algae awash in a warm, salty bath.

No one is stranded.

The earth gathers all in.

The earth gathers years as effortlessly as it turns

in an endless expanse with her little cousin the moon trailing,

as easily about nothing as her silvery visage entertaining so many benign speculations

on the nature of all beyond and within,

holding all future as dependent,

cohering as dreams to the pillows of our eyes,

asking dark when closed,

vivid now open looking at the moon to store the dead,

her own already a dusty crater.

Bow down and take up cello and bow,

arrow and bow, tree leaf and bower, ambition and tower.

With reason’s eye and singer’s glance, the curtain rises.

Act V where the cellist meets her match.

A breeze in the theater.

A tragedy, most engaging.

Trumpets, pack of hooligans,

the sick bed confession of a moment’s worry.

When it’s over, the actors clean up and go home,

the crowd mills in the street,

mixing with everyone like moving water, silt and leaves.

It is in the nature of symbols to come undone.

To unspool from minds, leave bottle necks and

margins like hands chaffed of crop workers, leather workers, tanners, preachers,

the infirmed and the dead.

Connection is no resolution

as even the grass of the valley feels an isolation from last year,

a chill not to be overcome but by the dream of the hill,

next year and the moon, dry beast that it is.

I am a dry beast too, all lawn plugs and goose shit,

breaking clods, tracking mud as in the words of a sermon heard long and sleepy,

both promising and melancholy with yolk of obligation and everyone

coming along to do their part.

A desert part, a hallucination,

the band strikes up as the choir urges the mind,

the swells pound the beach,

the stars on a different reach tracking the forestall

the diminutive capture of her last beat,

tear salt and rain dimple on a dusted path.

Foot fall, wing beat,

the pleat of folded clothes,

the sheets on the line billowing as lungs might or sails or sleep.

Tracings of sun behind the eyelid, salty skin and bare feet crinkled by water.

A cool long sip of the symbol laying in the flooded weeds of the stream.

Ophelia, once alive, so peacefully composed.

Harbingers sure as ships in the harbor or planes on the runway.

A great sleep again upon me and the world.

A vole burrows in the garden,

again the grass comes up.

She shoots a glance,

all possible, loaded, romantic as tales for the young,

Symbiotic as the tongue of another age

setting the stage to find us at it again.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

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