To the well with us, soaked in asking,
Baked like a bun, brown as ground,
Fertile as yesterday in our making.

Have we been stranded or freed
From the tyranny of ideas,
The math of memory now stored by the giga bite
To let our dreams drop the bucket into darkness.

We are all about it,
Talking like the first circle of hell is a picnic
Dante proclaimed and the stars from the city are pale.
The water from the ditch is muddy.
The truth in the people’s eye is greedy,
Lumpen, covered in the ash of songs
Trying on new clothes in the ash heap and refuse pile,
Indigestible, uncompostable,
The spread of weeds and retreat of glaciers and
The cobble and pebble of the shore are counted,
Minded, figured in but our destiny escapes us
As a fiction from the future’s faults and
The past is the field and our animal, vegetable brethren
All colored in warm sun to sit like mud and dry our cracks.

The track, the trail, the scent ever upward, ever backward
Looking up at the round patch of sky,
The globe of our imagining.
Posh, sumptuous feast
Of intellect and body posing before the mystery for a post card,
A greeting but deeply troubled as the present can be with misgivings of our way,
Uncertainties of the power to say it and make it so.
And so the echoes trailing the hill and canyon,
Strewn with clothes of Spring,
Browning with all things left out to weather or warm in the oven of earth.

Sparse fraction,
Difficult memoir of trains and columns and snow covering
As if people could sleep standing up or
Live in their cars for long.
At the beach head or down by the pool is longing,
Itching desire for her baubles of remedy and the secrets of sickness
Requiring of us this notice.

Patient Baker,
Wanted mugger of mothers as the magpie,
Cry black wing,
Fly sharp and as the dart’s arc,
As we bend back to earth and each other,
The bow spritely, stretched as the tension of space herself resisting mass
As in the hand of the Goddess landing a haggard army to sleep again in
All of the spring of her arrow- the idea of love and distance shooting between us
Gathering the momentum of doubt double checking to
The aim of the unspeakable indeterminate until
The very air rushes us and our own is as that owned by everyone and no one
Always in her state, as a room without space, a line with no end but
The gathering and scattering of seed and gloom and land.

By Rolf Stavig
9/25/2022