Between the worlds, the drift of light, the place of peace and pain, dust and wind.
Voice of ones under the wind’s patient strolling beyond the dunes of shore,
On the open water of the sky with hair bristling in the light.

Remember the turn key of the phantoms, their crooked stairs and sneers
To scare small children clutched together on our side of the wall.
Babies with their jammies and animal protectors as the little wheel of the mobile
Turning above the crib as a miniature of the hanging stars and all of the powers of being
That are so elusive and non-descript, so haunted, even as babies,
By our inheritance of the grisly human condition.

We grow conditioned, accustomed to the sneer on a traveled road,
The losses not reconciled of our violence and ignorance.
We don’t want to tie it all together but that little scratching sound,
Beyond the wall, by the far shore of the meeting rivers
Where the light lies down with the water and talks of mist,
Raises the question of the wet moon and of evaporation of the ones we knew,
Of what we know.

On our shore the dry desiccation,
Itself a language or lesson of the desert or is it just pain?
The bent lifting arm, the jaws of life finally arriving at the traffic accident or shooting.
Who gathered us here in such a hurry to be witness to such ghosts rising, such a siren,
The signals flashing until the touch of sense, when to stop, when to go, is gone.

The wet is everywhere as blood that should be in our veins has tracked
A metaphor train up the arm,
Fixed like a broken limb where souls pool before passage like a great ship
For each on the verge of release, true belief and liberation only to be pulled
From out of body like the one in the hospital bed holding a baby just born,
Just leveraged from the shore of ashes to the grass of light and
Where the two worlds meet is in each eye,
A mind to the thing of matter,
The blasted passage of timid inhabitants, our ancestors and
The overwhelming uncertainty of the lightness others claimed once and lost,
As we have,
Blessed in the hive of each other
A wonder over the source of longings we thought we knew alone but
Which now seem to beat in the blatancy of all things and
People left in the world sit
If only to wonder open upon it.

Between Open Worlds
Writing with Cancer
4-21-21
By Rolf Stavig