Never quite fulmination,
always leaning one way or another
towards each other over breakfast or out the window at noon.

Very ripe to over ripe
the berries, peaches, pears.
The softening of the middle and the middle softening of our era
and the age caught napping.
Startled, still dazed, amazingly driving and able to catch the wheel
and catch us up as a net hauls fish.

Night trawler, Governor, the numbers all a muddle.
Try to use only what we need.
Paint by numbers of a liberal revolution,
of deep ears and pockets for everyone to be free, in their way.

The poet laureate wakes her woman body, known all her time
and by the eye lashes and toe nails, knows her throat and belly intact,
her hair still a tussle from a dream,
from a fish in the night net and the lights of the boat
bouncing on the waves making the water move and
sink her stories a little lower
like the swaying pine trees
or the anchored kelp in a current of rush and brine
contained only by beaches far away with naked toes in the cold rushes of its foam.

Dawn foam, a light dress or
the rhythm of running, breathing hard,
starting the day with a good sweat and sunshine.

Break not, buy not, you have your share and mine is kinetic too,
out in the clapping hands of the crowd,
on the music of your strange and silent math entwining a
quantum familiarity with everything and hence a sorrow.

A poverty of all others
waking and turning over to a partner, still sleeping, to say “I don’t know you”.
Barely we met at the naked café or on the street catching eyes and signs
like the clothes given away, the secret signs of birth or parentage,
the rampage of cells like a river now spreading its flood over a broad plain.
As evaporation you become air,
as memory, dirt, as us reading, a flick of your hand,
the fly on the mind’s dim knowledge.

To say of a stone, “you are”, is a trick of history and reassurance.
To say to a man, “hold me”, is an act of political fervor.
To claim a personal interior, accessible to water like a clean, cold drink is
another meme for the lips moving, touching each other slightly,
still tasting of breath and need and hunger.

Baby hunger of loin muscles clenched in a brinksmanship of catch and release,
hold it, hold it, give way.

We rush for the doors, the ride home,
the golden road of the subconscious,
talking all the while.
Embryonic little ones cocooned in the branches of Autumn trees.
How odd that such futures – real money on the market- are bug faced and larval,
not our human hand at all but some strange future on a distant shore
holding the roiling ocean as you hold me and I hold you to the things
the past has witnessed in so many eyes / thighs.

By Rolf Stavig