That every nuance has an end tied to beauty and world.
Something of story to lead the mind along, mind that is so good at story
That sometimes we fool ourselves.
Willing participants suspending disbelief.
Show us, move us, tell us where we are from.
Tail feathers, beaks and talons.
Now is pulling on never enough,
Around the corner and out the door.

At the center of the bird world,
Ellipse of soul elided.
Left out even from the hole in the floor,
The air itself escaped and under the water,
Barely a bubble in the current.

Take your travesties somewhere else.
We suffer enough on our own.
We dress down and the brass tacks wound the skin.
The trail is too well trod come mid-Winter and
Growing more is getting late.
Rest your piece like a gun on the table.

Harvesters ply the field, a symbol for those left out, left over,
The worried dead at the brink, the door of another world laid down
Prosaically, never to be heard of again.
Never quite the same in re-runs of the big game when we had our moment and a
Fumble turned the tide.

Champion of the Underworld you take out your paint set and
Set about blue for the sky, orange for the horizon where the setting sun and dry grass
Mumble fire and murder.
Mumble tea sets and flimsy parade contraptions like
Rose Bowl floats in a growing stiff wind.
Amateur hour features a string of horses like
Trout still moving their gills and on occasion squirming.

You gave as much,
Holding back just to pace yourself in case and under glass
The makeup cracks, the names recede,
The lip turns chalky and when we breathe in
We know that ham is for sandwiches, loin is for the cellar and
Eggs are good for a while in the fridge.

Store house of a damn pantry.
Testament to broken fields.
We all still have to eat.
We wear back our fingerless gloves and
Sliver off moons of our fingernails, alert to dangers.
Don’t worry.
It is just us here.
Public safety be damned.

You breathe, I breath, let us all put inherent pestilence in a wine skin or
Bladder of a goat. Watchful creature, diminutive shadow.
A jump for every errant terror that might pass through a needle or keyhole unscathed.
A match for the dry brush, the hot wind rushing along the hill crest to
Where you live on lettuce and water cress.

Lizard meals,
Toads picked by falcons or smashed bloody by car tracks on the road.
Show me your limousine, your warm left overs.
Table dances, paper flowers, furniture.
Show me the dice on your green felt looking up with a three and a five.
Show me the machine gunner’s nest and the soft breast of the feathered robin.
She stole things in the folds of her dress.
She anticipated how history might receive the titles of a lost class, the
Losers in a war of attrition.

How the sun found its way into the yard or shone on grey battleships or
Dappled with the branches of the fallen dead.
You have given enough.
Lets let someone else take a turn.
Who wants to hold the hand of our Lady of the Valley?
Who has the cowslip bloom in her mouth, the ruddy complexion of the
Turnstile floor with its sand and dust, left by thousands of commuter’s feet
Plodding and plotting a rush or a hurry,
Only to lie down full, after supper as if the TV were a fire and the things missed
Were only someone else and their sleepless wives.
His bent arm and sleeve a pillow-
A little after dinner spittle before brushing teeth and to bed.

The terror of what is missed gets collated on the pillow between your ears,
Beneath your hair and behind your eyes where the real action takes place.
Sleeping puppy, mummy.
Gave it all for you to have a chance.
Inheritance, forbearance, ice berg bobbing.
Waking just a wink before sinking back to the sea’s lap,
The floor of worlds cracking, the whisper of gods evaporating.
We spent too much time below decks.

Valedictorians committed suicide over less and nightly less and
Less gathered her steam like dry, stray hairs still on the brush.
Like towns full of animals.
Like purple bruises on the body politic, swollen, corpulent,
Not amenable to the practices of the day like bleeding by leeches or
Staying up all night for three days running.
What do we gather by such fatigue?
We may have left each other so we must go back.

Back and back down the spiral snail slime trails to mollusk and bi-valves
Filtering sea water as an incipient heart turning the wheels of the sand.
Until all of the clocks are scattered and come up as one for a great breath
Breaking the surface like a whale.

Meant to be this way.
Imagine nothing else.
Browned by close fire,
Our succulence re-membered.
The good fight and chase of prey.

We pray and muscle is lean,
The eye sharp,
Perception within range of a devastating strike.
Three on three and we are out like a tree, broken inwardly
To reveal the phylogenesis of all and to all the unusual awareness,
Between dips in the terrain,
Dry as day, early on, earth again turned and turned to stones, dust,
Ash for another wind.

The fold and the eruption, the tide and the trench.
Timid souls taken through the windy door, glancing back
As for the sounds of vestments and
Long travels the hum, the white noise,
The static of distant and imminent infinities.

By Rolf Stavig
2-06-2021