Child of Summer
Wind of Winters long
Tucked behind the ear of the mountains,
As a pencil, the nub of glasses or the loop of a mask.
Delicate ear shape,
Lobe of the girl child and folded skin,

Turned in so close to mind as to be the smell of day,
The very urge of us all to make as the air makes,
A clear path, as the water makes,
As the forest slumped in rain suggests the blurring of amplitude
For a simplicity as a cold stone in a stream or
Marooned in a field like each of us
Tapping possible grave or foundation corners
Where sadly the city rises.

All corners and blocks and whir of fans and sprinklers
So much like the air, the chair, the desk lamp,
Humbly serving illumination.
A secret place in your chest.
If you look now you can find it,
Just between respiring lungs,
The folds of the inner landscape,
The flurry of its weather and
Protuberance of its ship yards, bridges, hoisting job sites and
Crouched cranes on four stout jack legs.

A metal worker on the moist skeleton of the inside.
A miner on the mountain of her sorrows,
Dead now nearing 100 years,
Solitude fresh as an apple.

The visage of the time far enough away to count the outcomes
Of her particular fears as a child, as a girl, a Russian and Winter.
They say one paid all dues but then
The camp was struck,
The hymns and flapping flags found that museum
Stretched in quiet on a wall or in the world’s precious display case
And all the pouring rivers cried for drought and
The deserts became a shallow sea
Zippering open the red spine of the continent
Like a hanging carcass in the slaughterhouse.

Count your flowers now,
Your disappearing act
Like a grudge given money,
Like money itself
Traveling through everyone’s pockets of desire.

The inner fold of flesh,
Her thigh tanned,
Her mind open as a holiday, a walk,
A library, an ice cream shop.

Take us in vast mother,
Turns us over like the washer and drier.
We long to be known.
I know to hold you just so
As a crystal in the light
Or a jeweler with her eye piece set,
Squinting in at the value of such things,
The lasting value of the earth
That is busy erasing its tracks with grass.

By Rolf Stavig