Jazz up your exercise, you flabby beasts.
Dial on the old phone or push the calculator buttons on
Your old main frame.
Your progress known, your weaknesses apparent,
Abhorrent title of this or that.

It is not the office holder but the blown tower of that Old German Lord.
Poor Holderlin, kept as a curiosity maligned with praise and
The mendacity of proclaiming mental health for some.
We all need protection.
We need her leather carry case and boots with good seams.
We need a fresh identity.

You old poet
To carve up the one and many of the heart.
Finally proclaiming the God dead, the many Gods scaring from the lake
In a rush of wings, minor deities and beauty.
The news is heard.
We are thrown back like the wrong kind of fish in an over catch.

Invoke the dark birds of the silent romantic,
The moment of movement after years of stasis.
We are as one held in an ice block, an ice age,
A hairy beast now thawing from the permafrost.
Your horns supply the dilemma from before the poet died.
Synthesis of feeling and sense.
Body now going soft, rotting with the
Very melt of its liberation.

Putrefaction is the green and the black like stock yard mud.
The old chamber pot has been improved upon,
The waste of us remains the same.
No worry, animal body,
Embrace of the mind with its worldly origins, its return
Where the dark is upon the dark, mute, sempiternal.

A great worry and then nothing.
The great worry again, Teutonic in failure,
Not quite humanity ready to build,
Not even ready to fail honestly.

Deep humble genius in his tower room.
Studies with Hegel now a memory of going out,
Standing alone in gripping air.
Alone with servile standard bearers getting it wrong.
Alone in the morning,
Alone in night.
Aeschylus, Tubingen,
The river Neckar flowing by.

By Rolf Stavig
12-27-2020