The poems written,
Not quite said as I want to say
On the eve of the pandemic
To have it all go away and
See what we are left with
On the wire of now,
Future passing through and
The past with its layers supporting the ground.

The basement of our understanding and
The tendrils as from black soil reaching
To test the pressures of the air,
Its temperature and disaster.
Finding a crack in an old man’s eye,
The root a little shifted before it is
All feed for the mice and little mammals
As in the time post meteor 65 million years ago,
Now a thin white line in the sediments,
A tumble of bones flooded up the wash
Of the ancestral Dakotas.

The thin blue line between the life and oblivion.
The capture as we travel of a thousand reflections
Like a rear view mirror.
The feel of the time of cars,
Freeways clogged with the red tail lights and
The glide of white lights in a destination rumbling
Even at a distance,
With its rumbling consumption of time.
Some are left behind, or
All of us a trace of earlier strivings.
Earlier Stavigs,
Now the grass and earth of prairies and hills.

Ancestors so quietly press and
From the well of language,
I wonder what I can pull up and out of the dark
With a bucket dripping water.
A handsome recluse full of doubt.
Diaspora of last year’s insect swarm.
Fields dry, creek beds buzzing,
Stalks coming from the muddy margins.
A hint of a track as from a bird lifting from blown snow.

Everything from something else and
Now you listening,
Me half attentive to our restless bodies of perception
To apprehend in the shapes and shadows of the night
The asphalt cold, black and hard.
That stretch of future and past.
Pulled over for a stretch and a bite.

At the liminal
In between where world collected what lay
Where the wind put it,
Where water couldn’t reach it,
Before the sand buried it a thousand feet
To wait where a bend in the river traversed,
Where another kind of dead offered no comfort.

The old lonely hill,
Eagerly mounted, surveyed,
Playing further reluctant parts.
We each have our doubts.
Nothing is quite good enough.
Nobody cares but as it might whisper their name,
My name, lasting as the formed frame,
As the ideals once held,
Beyond the momentum of change,
To gather us in like a harvest.

Ruptured grain on a bloody battle field,
Starvation rations on a long march,
A change of weather for the worse.
Some words you can put on abused feet for some respect and warmth.

The land is stolen.
The month is hotter than it should be.
There are bullet holes in rusted metal doors,
Peep holes for very thin spirits,
Like gasses from their homes in the corners of the old ones
and from the settler’s eyes.
The hiss of a leak and
A stage vast as land.
A fastening of garment come loose and dropped
As a left out year
Plotting diminutive scenes of revenge.

We should all be afraid.
The stupid won’t protect us.
The mute held sway a thousand years before the rain came.
The rain came and came until it was said it will come.
It will rain down upon us.
And like the ideas of the ancients,
We struggle to make sense of it,
Now already passed,
Where we crumble some dry clods on the side of the road
To assess and assay
As the bloom of a sunflower might,
Or the smut of corn, the ancestor Huitlacoche.

The hunger of the people.
Ones who fear.
Ones who got out.
Ones who rain down upon us.
Again and again,

The travel as a great wheel turns
As the tight glomerulus of the kidney filters,
As the bay spread beyond the delta,
The beaver ponds beyond the tall grass,
The shelter,
As of hard years, dim seasons,
Aimlessness.

By Rolf Stavig
12-31-2020