Big Numbers, Small Us
Big Numbers, Small Us
Mathematics called to little pains and wind,
The best flowers of a season’s expectation calling,
Called, backing up into the story.
The arrivals of the old brood pushed up in the tides,
Taken back out over the rocks.
Right to say that the ancestor was snail or worm
or cocooned still in the wet spit of fles,
The blue eggs of the robin or truncated in a softening stump.
Shivers of me, clapping thunder,
Business as usual, grumpy as wet boots.
Get the piles of grain moved before they are wet and ruined.
Clang of the shovel, a clinker, stuck and rotten as something in the pipes.
Some thing that grew me and now I grow
With my droppings and misshaped plans.
It doesn’t turn out as expected.
Submerged ambitions of someone’s yesteryear.
A bruise coming through on the skin..
A flake coming off a rusty pole.
A dress rehearsal for what happened before,
Gracious number, toadstools above the wet network of ground.
The gnome with melted feet and his shovel stuck in the ground.
A bitter fight ensued.
Why waste all of our liberty?
Cool could settle on the land and then
Winter could settle everything like night.
That is enough but it goes on and on.
The bracing face of the in between,
Here now wondering what to do.
It’s a hungry city, an angry mob, a full jail
and Ruffians want to be paid
and the children, ever alert even while sleeping,
They twitch with the strange dreams.
A tower of cheese, a string necklace of olives,
a snack of nuts and juice.
Remember now in hindsight that things were well,
People, even I, seem to have grown up, amassed, slept,
Moved on season by season.
And season by season, the turning clocks and
The dripping water of changes
are more profound than we might imagine.
No landscape is lasting, no family complete.
The antique dealers keep frail thin lips of china cups,
Just so on the shelves behind glass while far more sink in the surface of things,
Chip and start the life of neglected things turning to elements,
Heaped in solution to slowly dissolve towards a rock cycle of future cataclysm,
But more likely patience and accretion.
The dam break,
The gurgle and trickle miles from the source over a parched fied.
Everything taken from me, fixable at a price i the short run,
Taken like dirt from the hill as the long run turns its ten thousand years
Like a smile, just a tune up of the lip of Mona Lisa, the buddha with his trailing dream.
It takes a lot of vacuuming, dusting, planting for the people
to get their dishes done and the young raised,
Generations on the street, in the field on the back forty
Perfecting our democracy with insecticide.
Planting our future with chrome.
Sitting down to study with a book and paper.
Clairvoyance as to the course of rivers, ten year plans,
The model and math and flood.
All in hand cool and blue as earth circling, day in day out.
The rambunctious tribe in my mind is no balm for the feeling.
Imagining her soul is no solution,
Reeling away, capitalizing, laying back to wait for sleep to replace worry.
The eye in all things, it is us, me
Who is full of regret, what if and how now,
The adaptation of moments to plans,
language to reason,
Logic to insight,
Sharing to love,
Love to growth
Growth to depth in the deep twilight of the black backdrop,
Caring not in an immensity writ tiny
In the largesse of infinities.
By Rolf Stavig
06-07-2020
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