Soul Scapes Travel with Pharaoh

Soul Scapes Travel with Pharaoh’s Cat

Borrowing bodies, floating screens and avatars, the joints of our issuing forth.

The bruises of our questions on the wings of seeming to approach,

As the horizon accepts stars, moon, sun, twilight.

I am barely lit as the dark falls equally and slowly,

As around our feet, swishes grass.

Around ears call birds of the ancient Egyptian mausoleum

or is it just the barn, Its owl and wren talking a language of spiders

and gristle.

Beards

and chins of good ladies smooth from carrying on

the raft of our backs,

The drip of our insulin,

the handmaid of the hospital,

still made for all

As the high tomb once held mummies wrapped in dark for the next world.

Trading bodies and bringing their cats along to singe the far hill

where we smell faintly

the distant forest fire of our story.

The glad hands are long silent.

Some somber smoke of the offering drifts as myst from

the river over cold Tee Pees.

A rough hand of Montana leather and sleeping on open ground.

Traveling the Universe on a trap without wheels, drawn on by beyond

And her beautiful winged chariot.

To rest on this side is to know the far side, also present,

Like a bulb of hot glass for the blower to expand.

The hand of the artist turns their strings of hot glass as

Those that reach from our stomachs and from the tops of our heads

To unite in light beyond mere days

To mere nights

To huddling close to ground, as an animal might,

Or Pharaoh on a dream of death.

Really come to death as the cur dogs and hyenas might

Grasp a long bone,

Might tie on something of the living to nourish the progeny and

Their jumping tails,

Disappearing in tall bronze grass – dry

As teeth in a rattle.

High as turning Jupiter and his retinue of Gods,

Us, sitting writing.

By Rolf Stavig,

Writing With Cancer Group 6-17-2020

Rolf's Poems and Pictures