You find yourself, a sitting queen or king,
Patron of the fortunes milling in their studios, or
On the corner, in cafes and theaters conceiving as
In the night the wings brush all of our eyes.
A quiet talk of where dream meets reality.

Wait, back up, no trespassing on the laws of language
Where sentries and lawyers have taxes and libraries.
No field is free, no planet distant enough for minds to join with
A circus of non-existence and speculation.
It is. It isn’t,
Who can say but those saying the subtle signs of intent
With each other to organize.

A mighty army of night minds and artists, ordinary people pressed into service.
No one wants a bon fire but a few bolts of lightning strike in the dry forest.
Everyone wants the publisher and the editor to work together.
All jobs are too big for one.
One is too big for all jobs.
It’s just the way language works.
Tempter of the temptress of your mind on the mattress.

Of your partners on the picket line, the food line, the office of culture- holding the line.
Access to the way we see.
Therapy for how we feel.
Free and not free.
The glorious, painful pressure,
The tension of the past poets like the bow string of your arrow,
The release of loin, the pelvic floor realized in shining armor.

Stage craft as for inauguration or the second coming.
Pluck the strings, pay the soprano, the operetta,
Bring Hamilton up from dusty pages for a relief act worthy of all our sufferings.
We are bored now.
The end never seems clear and all of the spilled blood of tragedy leaves us
Cold and white as corpses with our ticket stubs and resurrection.
Free the way of consideration for such matter as a course on the art of being alive.

Strange terms in an uneven argument.
Each take up your places; let us rehearse.

Quantum fixity, eons both finite and endlessly capable of reproduction, variety,
A tension as first lines, notes of the aria rise as twilight back lit as a quiet night might reveal.
We have the tools,
The semblance of solution taught to generations past and hence.
The henge is laid to account for the cricks in a crooked cross,
The passage over a line from the dramatic to the obscene and personal.
Enough to drive your mother mad,
Your suffering, your ignorance all teed up with the team and the broad cast, right on time,
Impeccable, paying good money to move us all, all of us, forward,
As the troops in blind passage once charged the hill, really over the top.

Person and personality, gaping, gawking, quietly considering the possibility
Most mammalian that the young and the passion of fishes to swim and
The freedom of birds to fly, women to talk, sunlight to shine,
Water to drain to its lowest gravity, all law, all implication,
Fine speech and baby murmur as winds and streams,
You know, the mind involved in one perceiving such things,
Such emptiness as a packing case, a lock box at the bank, peering in,
Touching it with our fingers, the original manuscripts, stage directions,
Authorial intent and blast goes the bomb,
Soldier, sailor, missing mother,
Birth goes the plan,

Lover, weekend, tryst and jam.
Head on the pillow, bandages loosened, cross on the wall,
Wire net mesh on the window of the scholar, read on timid soul,
A diet of feathers,
A revelation of dust in light and
Water, the endlessly turning, unfair number,
Why is no one talking with me,
Why is the grumble self-evident
As hunger on top of GI problems,
After birth, post-partum, at the gates of heaven peering in and
Looking back as the chronicler chisels graven signs,
Thin as smoke rushing to lowest pressure, diffuse order.

Cap sized missions of bruised lovers,
Out of time, bereft with the word
As could be gives over intent to one younger,
One full of passion still
As the curtain falls.

By Rolf Stavig,
12-20-2020