Hold and grasp, to caress the mind’s little currents and eddies in our conversation,
Launched from your lips, from the way things seemed to be at the time.
Of course we are wrong headed, as the future always laughs at the past.

Summations of drinking water from a tall beaker.
A measure of all time
Silent but for the gurgle and gulp of our breath interposed with the water going down.
Galoshes and tarps,
Kit for the storm and gear to snap for navigation on the dash of the car.

Going down, Virgil, with memory of kisses, wash tower font and source of the ancient river:
Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio,
River of Styx, Oblivion, Tiber.
Carry the bodies loaded with silt.
The lizards and snakes look on like famished soul birds molting on the voltage wire,
Past their season like a man of 95 on a gallant try of re-union with the guard of the dead-
Fierce as the margin dogs keeping tab on good territory, freed
From obeying any orders but their own nature and the feeble poverty of bones still
Holding skin, still bobbing in the rank, turbid flow of black rivers and leaves
Reflected as shadow movements on the bottom as their gold tug turns ten thousand and
A thousand more down the winding way of the water.

I am a tight spool.
Electric lines drape so elegantly from their poles.
I am a dim light on a far away barge with a sputtering motor
Pushing good Dante further in his gloom,
His circles turning, the dogs barking, his poet weeping as
Love would have us all orphaned and divorced, hungry and bare foot.
The path that does not wander, as the fixed star, the tablets, commandments,
The Fall of man now a must, a museum musk, a mask, a pantomime of buskers,
Cuffs rolled up, tattoos of fiery dragons and red, sleepless eyes.

Your dirty fist at first light,
Sleeping rough is no place for woman,
A woman found,
Old man risen from the dead,
Crossing back like a horse in water up to his flanks,
Up to her lips pursed with the wet questions,
The hold of light in the moving river,
The shades, highlights of her gold, leafy hair.

The air high as cloudy Olympus,
White as dear Greece and
Her porpoise sliding so clean in the water
Like a knife.

Soldier, sailor, hidden eye,
Your captive beneath the cap of rhyme and liar on the back field
Looking up to take measure of time from the sky.
Her graceful wrists, supple as the boughs,
Shady as the river place that drinks you down.

Motion and momentum, weight and work,
The costumes of the tragic stage bode and bow and foretell
As quickly we echo what we already know.
The poet will look back.
His lover will turn to stone.
The dead will have to stay by purgatory’s empty marker,
A stone on the border of the field.

Child, old man, woman, war horse, all to early tombs,
Blood dry as dirt, black as bile,
The mile from here to there is posthumous,
Up against the hands of you and your woman or man,
Holding back the river with rounded stones and grout.
Holding out your idea of flower as flower itself
On its long stalk among brethren, in the stamen and pistil of seed form.
A dim idea, still a thought – saving graces as the angel horde
Now graced with no bodies – only voices shined by fire,
Spread by wind, honed in on the loneliness of those still alive.

Drifting derby,
Hat on the water,
Black steer in the branding shoot,
His round universal belly to rupture,
As the goods spill,
As memory of origin fades,
As the pull of the old under world and the logic of order is effaced
Like deranged traditions gussied up for tourist spoils,
The wild eyed few and the complacent many at the mournful hour
Where the hero once emerged,
As from the hair of Venus fully formed on the shore,
The new enclave as something dusty, brought back from the moon in a metal case.
What are we to do with this?

Reverent question, palsied or beautiful on lip and cusp,
Endured in ecstasy, palpable quantity, effortless certainty,
Gasp of endless reverberation on the variation in number
Beyond combination,
Numen tucked into woman’s brow
Like dawn on the water spread.

By Rolf Stavig
10/09/2021