Splayed

Splayed

Such speaking of things, their mute origins,

presence in the morning

Sitting on a table like a bowl.

Like music on the air,

travails wash up the gulley sides with detritus of the flood.

The thunder and night almost fully fallen on the sage and spiny brush.

Lay down and sleep here in the sand under the stars.

Some spilled paint on the floor

or the build up of tiny mountains on the palette of the painter

who pushed up and smeared the colors of his wayside creation

as he pursued some primary purpose in his painting.

The primary purpose, years later, like left over, left out things or

even treasures with their burnished and fragile care.

Tomes on arrangements and placement like schematics for

The space shuttle engineers, lay outs, diagrams, directions.

That could be said to touch on order and correspondences we can see,

demonstrate and replicate,.

Correspondences of sense, art, perception and history have some other mind call,

An address in the far away.

Revolutions begun with the urgent gain say, the relative truth.

The inevitability of infinity, almost boring in its totalizing, mock simplicity.

How something vast can rest in a phrase, a movement of the arm on stage.

The fall of dancers felt like all the dark of the final curtain coming down.

We teach kids that things in the dark are just as they may be by day, its all there

Mundane, obeying some dumb law, persistent in its assumptions, pressed by all

To be taken for granted.

Grants and awards, achievements and celebrations, even the patient teaching,

The diabolical epiphany come to catch her sorrowful eye.

That’s the IV for the invalid, the death bed of her world, still worth writing down.

The white plastic blinds on the window, her hays days and lover on the shore.

A time for collecting up the bits and pieces.

Here and there, enough to eat.

She had children late in life.

The babies have their own babies now.

The shirts passed one to another.

The lamp light is warm. The wind picks up.

I had a great forgetting.

I couldn’t find my keys.

Found damp clothes by the dishwasher,

Leaks in the floor and ten times what we need by the door.

The wise woman lets it pass.

She says mouth of soul, rain of leaves, weeds,

Overhanging branches in the bower of being lost, timeless,

after sleep in the change.

Cloud cover, sun and a number come,

The effort falls back to dreamy potential, wisened cracks, all consuming tasks.

Bent over the wheel and the water, taking up space,

The wheel and the water.

Stone refugee buried in sand.

Hard desert sun

Blind for the duck, the shoot, the wait for cooler weather.

The garlic and the pantomime around and around,

The leather strap and the skip of stones, flat and smooth,

The water dashed.

Flat and supreme, the spiral of the breath of growing things,

The strain of the drain down the face of water, the shape of space in the clouds

And the galaxy and the moon with patient math, loosening its tether by milimeter a year.

Hair and fingernails apace even on the corpse with its residue of unspent momentum,

The gift of circles, ad infinitum.

The worm gone to ground,

Fish up the ladder of the river to spawn in cold waters,

The eyes of the vegetables open to the night to be eaten- multi form

Like the eyes of the flies upon them,

The fence slats of the highway rushing by out of date like

Black and white film, the sputtering sounds of the projector’s stops and starts.

Something said sticks in her mind like a grudge or revenge.

Murders red as roses.

Waterfalls hot for rocks and the mist in the air rising from the coincidence of meeting,

The tumescent gord, the spiky fruit of tropics, buzzing, broken open

and sweet and sticky with flies.

Our insides humming, t

the job at hand drumming that night dance, that sad window,

The look of sailors, wives, mothers, out the window,

Out to sea.

There is a street of doubt and one of knowing, blue and red,

Stubbed toe and bloody nose.

She lets the black nail grow until it falls.

Another piece of our human inheritance shed like dandruff and dust mites.

Obsessive cleaning leaves raw red fingers but no surety on the conviction

Or even on the evidence of wrong doing.

Sifting farm land, dry dirt, dust, flakes of skeletal remains.

The plough turns us under.

The blemishes are food in the fungus autocracy.

The simulacrum of disaster finally getting momentum,

Stripping us to essential amino acids and tense stand offs with each other.

The cover is blown.

The laundry is off the line, in the tall grass rustling like some flag whipped.

Some gross approximation leaving out the people completely.

The village deserted, the crows,

A Cadillac of cacophony.

Enough, simple as saying five or ten times the weight.

It might seem that being buried is better,

But some live by air, carry their attitude in their hair,

Blown by circumstance, circumspect and aware of being seen, even when dead.

Some go at great lengths for such postulates that might leave the root cellar open,
always cool, dark and available for her child escapes.

The seriousness of saying “snow” and wash, table and time.

Pour a glass of red wine.

A tumbler of brown bourbon, an ointment for arthritic knuckles, ameliorating,

Laying in wares, safety like the harbor, like staying home, putting in a window.

Rest is not quite the right word.

Maybe eavesdropping or “politburo”

Grass valley, smooth sailing but

We have to talk.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

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