A day as a door left open as elements mingle through.
The bread and the wind, the table at rest.
Soul’s sufficiency neither sweet nor bitter,
A harmony there that sets things to their places here.

With such reflection as water gives to glass,
Things of time to the transparencies of lasting light that travels,
Shapes and is perceived with.  Light by its nature contains a
Splash of the chemist’s information and the astronomer’s scale.

Bug, free as mice and us, to be no equal but for achievements of time herself,
Seeming still but unfurling yet the colossus of her weave and tapestry.
Clothing for the fogs of mind and feeling on such cold mornings revealing
As to the nature of things their ring and endurance.

The striving and contemplation to lend flavor, appreciation, purpose and better ends.
We all know the ends of which was spoken.
That the act of speech and your reception of the signs in ideas were
as to the war fleet of boats and soldiers gripping tight their lives.

For appearance sake, all falls away.
As the landscapes of impermanence are yet beguiling,
Over written on hard survival as a smile on a beautiful face.
Beautiful in the sense of one you know and love over time, even those lost.

Still shining in the mind’s eye.
Not quite the light of reason or suffused sorrow,
Blown here as by chance we might have gathered together
And here we are.

Thin veils of art and stage to enhance beauty with truth,
Show the outcome of injustices as the defeated gain power and
The reconciliation commission drafts its law.

The wind and leaking water show, as the loose slats on the abandoned farm fence,
That the grass and the coyote are better off without us.
No plow for the six foot swells on the plains and the sea grass also
Has no good word, like the corral, for our deep clean cut of harbors and
Hulls of ships with ungainly buoyant mass.

I feel myself on such a surface weighed and weighed down.
Paternity beyond measure is to the child as a mime with a face of eternity
Reflecting not as instructor or co-conspirator, but as one through a glass,
Intimately limited.

As each of us to one another, shielding the pretense of the empty,
Comes up as from under water with a splash of bubbles and a gulp of air.
Born as Venus on the wave, such drapery and
The cunning miracle of hair and skin designed as by no one but history and time herself
Positing the anguish of each generation in tender yet durable form.

Such immensity do we hide from and rightly turn down our eyes,
Rightly resolve to do better unto the future, redress the rivers of pain and
At the sumptuous feast, distinguish what is good from the rest.
Such stores do we lay in for dark days like ours.

Such need of animal rest and respite for the mind from understanding.
Always in brinksmanship of the moment, at the coast, border and margin,
Implements at hand, no wonder we sympathize with doing nothing,
Letting the other half live and letting loss of reason claim the lion’s share of
Intuitive existence.

The dark is our friend – making oblivion.
The day is a burden – making right and wrong.
Declination subsumes the meter and the measure
Is a tunic worn too tight.

Naked emptiness is herself a veil and the lift,
Bright as heraldry, is uncomfortable for the living
Who have witnessed the stuff they are made of.

The living stuff of cells and time,
The gossamer stream of ideas, the cow on a lead, the chicken bobbing, the dog aiming to please
Until a moment of his own seclusion opens like a meal for the taking.
Hot pants, half projects, a series of training exercises to ravel and unravel things,
The brain not least of all.

Captured means only the opportunity of release.
For art, release is an opportunity of experience we others can travel through.
For the jail of caught things, the stage, the painting, the poem, all plastic concept of book
And word evolved in pluribus, one with another not so, but personal to her trouble,
General to the weal and disasters of woe.

Enough to toe ourselves out beyond the breakers where broken on some air mattress,
Tied with socks, leaking its glue, again in a bubble of elements.
Raspy in the gratuity, the door leads to the alley, the alley home
On a course trodden somehow leaving the one we thought we knew – outside.
Looking out as a tenant without the rent, a blasphemer in search of a voice,
Taken in by subtlety and intrigue.

Taken in by the seventh
To the lotus of the Bodhi
Wherein the empty empties itself, the lit lamps flicker,
The silent water trickles beyond the ear’s hearing, for there is no one here.
No ear, no eye, no mind.

Gather us in the hood of tendency to the habit of the garden
To grow beyond the rocks
As the path that doesn’t wander is itself burst
As owning up is bowing down
As contradiction sums the enemies of chaos
And the decorative flourishes on her vest and cup,
Her lip and breast,
His confidence and submission.

By Rolf Stavig, 12-23-2020