The crabs and muscles,
Barnacles habituated to hold on,
Come what salty may in the rush of cold tide or smashing storm,
In the sharp teeth of animals and woman with her bucket collecting,
Man with his plans sharp as rapier, thin as wire.

Tulip brained seeing beauty everywhere in destruction, explosion, sunrise
And they say slowly the moon is pulling away from the earth,
Her captured math of turning perfection just off enough like everything
To force moments to crisis or the drift of entropy eventually.

Her harbor swollen with time.
Her satchel loose, her feet bare as a deer picking among the detritus,
Junk, garbage, cans, grass, the pushing mud and sledge
Finding the equilibrium of neglect when we are finally gone.

The barefoot girl is Demeter, our Goddess ideal and she carries other hopes
As awkward as Santa with his bag or the hillbilly refugees loading cars and planes and
Kids and pillows now wet and cold with exposure.
What happens to our ideals?
Wherefor the words in pensive letters and desperate searches.
Even e-math loses its way in the testimonials of date sites still
Looking for each other – his perfect form and her effortless grace.

Green bottle among sea rocks,
Tad poles in murky water,
River runs, floods,
A thousand miles of open grass and forest.
Life after people is no fulfillment of our dreams.
Not some new master or mistress of god’s time.
Only time herself, still as all efforts – calibrated just off enough
That in a billion iterations one might again raise her head
With claim and cry of why me - dripping wet
Fully formed in the surf
To survey the cling of beauty and tragedy to everything.

To be the passing, past self, is to call all others and the mess they made of it,
Just as me probing the feeling and limit of being alive.
It is a call to deeper sleep,
A confounding of number by image of hope,
A calibration that tunes,
A heart that aches eternal enough
To prize even the far and further shore,

Home,
Diminutive, certain as meals of
Broken bread and wine.

By Rolf Stavig
11/7/21