Home is ever and never arrived,
Borrowed from sleep
With debt to dog and cat, plant and laundry.
Show us the snow, poultice of memory
Still wet from application,
Sun up, sun down – still wet from application.
The wraps, the bandages around the head, Samurai style
But laying down, beyond sleep or concentration, laying down
Beyond Ophelia in the now dry fields of death,
In the poppies of progress that turn minds on and off,
As the curtain rises and the act begins on the slow wheeling stars.

Show fathoms of emptiness gulped in a breath of inward time,
Maybe half past eight, Winter, dark,
Just up from shy and down stream from bold,
Frozen surfaces, but underneath the air and water gurgle by.
As the rotator blooms a galaxy,
As the sun up tunes the Summer grass hopper,
The early time and late fatigue unites morning and evening,
Dawn and dusk with supple shades in the movement of blush shine.

Inevitable momentums drive the scene
Like the circulating crowd of the train platform,
Loaded and disgorged at intervals,
As teeth, as dominos, dynamos
In their pressing spin in the power holes of the dam
Harnessing her rushing water.
Day and night she moves as the air so gently agitating
With tree leaves and the future in scry before us
As false as witness, language, prediction and math
Because it is the mind again turning.

The restless savants and their tables, powders, lamps at the glass,
Reflecting solemnity as the sad harlequin at the proscenium edge
Begins her soliloquy on pregnancy, roundness and the blood in circles,
Percolating as all deep rivers and far shores of the sky,
All blessed ones allied as chorus to her gorgeous suffering,
Their mute as powerful as song
With all waiting for their own laments of home to intrude again.

Discords cut short,
The train arrives as the salt of the people and their rubbed groins exchange.
They balance the going and coming like her water levels, gestation,
Waiting for humanity to be ripe-
A little past her longing, on the verge,
Trying to avoid such suffering as all know at times
Alone or at home.

The build up of a catatonic state in an urgent crowd,
Almost a mob swells with weapons, beside her, inside her,
Hungry with neglect of the driving force of her love-
May it not be squandered,
Left as groundless as the banks of the flooded river
Overspreading the furrows of the fields,
Filling the divots of the land so easily
Like wash of time or draught of time and sand.
All can be lost,
On the far margin of tummy time
Where late sacrifices count for nothing in the ritual order and
The ritual order is not Jupiter
Rotating his clouds as the King of the Gods,
Turning, biding, abiding.

By Rolf Stavig,
8/14/2022