Cramped and crowded,
Cooled too long to warm the breath of the axe,
The old river running red.
Without arms, the torsos of the ancients
Toy with my random scrawl -
The Tablature of the codex
Of slaves and our gods.

Blowing wheat of Artemis,
The occlusion of Saturn by mighty Jupiter.
Oracular sentiment still stuck in the twentieth century,
Still stuck like a centurion in Britain, walls, streets and aqueducts
Finding their mortar turn to powder for burial
With crop mud and the supermarket foundation of our lives.

Old hands and prickly beards,
The barber pulls teeth and does minor surgeries.
That is how people die.
Crowded together or exposed together on the plain.

Lifting wallets from corpses that seem to hide blobs as rubies
Just beneath skin of white snow.
Rude torrent of where the neck used to be,
Her chandelier of vision now tingling and vacant in the hall.
The smoke filled hall with voters and their rubber mallets
Pushing forward the count, disassembling the body politic once again.
Again and again like feet in a long line,
Like pearls around her graceful sway,
As breeze in her trees
As toads in her pool.

That raffishness of singular attention,
All blades and shiny innuendo,
Let us dance, let us bring up the rear,
Set thin guards before great thick doors.
Bear hat, chorus line and the two shall meet
as a great steed meets the street,
Clattering over stones and wet gutters.
She has the sniffle and he the stout.

Craven rubbings of brass,
Marble carved to wing and copse.
Myrtle leaves and holly engraved with names,
The olive and the almond pressed for sweet oils,
The brocade of her hair lively as the brook and
In the sink of her washing, cool as the waters of her arms,
Now missing, her head slightly tilted in abundance.

Her generous gift aged as cheese,
The barrels of her vault surmounted with their tight iron clasps and
Racks of slow maturity,
A kind of wisdom in the Jarlsberg, a freedom in the Brie.
Be with me on the grassy mount,
On the subaltern of another offering,
Graces of Delphi, spare change, kneeling.
Are we here to give or are they crawling to collect spills,
Bits of grain from the dry carts,
The wooden wheels making another turn.
Taking our turn at the wheel.

The arrow of geese confused by the warm air, headed South, North, everywhere
Staying put for Winter stubble, the cut of what is left us
Thin as gruel and potatoes, still dirty, going soft in the cellar.
Call it what you will.
The omens and oracles of demise,
We all predict as much from our circumstance going down.
We all say as little as possible so it can be pieced together later.
We all lay down.
We pile up like bodies,
Like bubbles on the shore.
Her loosened clothes in the twilight,
Her graceful feet in the cold sand.
We all know one or two moments from another.

Barn stormer turned upside down. We all know.
We bend the reeds with a little raft,
We smile with the rising sun and
Leave a morsel of breakfast for the bird,

Be she snake bird or serpent with a lion’s mane,
The colorful feathers and distinctive hop as the magpie shine
or long Egypt with her Nile.
Old smile covered in sand and dams.
Old ways warmed by the Christmas fire.
Don’t travel too quickly, stay a while.
We have some dressing and undressing of the bird to do.

The sails are stretched and tan.
The feasts have done their part.
Now we lay us down and sleep
As the peat deep and dark as a Celtic soul.
Thick and messy as the gate of hell,
Her tributaries both furious and aloof,
Her train of thoughts now beads and stones.

Things precious as things worthless,
All scattered around, sometimes found.
We keep our eyes open a little too late,
Combing the hair,
Found and waiting,
Grieved and wanting,
Satiated, prime,
Cut with cloth,
Bolstered in the rack,
How we all go for sale and forgetting,
For something and for nothing.

By Rolf Stavig

12-22-2020