Furrowed, rutted, the boot leather dry and peeled off its shoe.
Love the mud, the trickling run off, the start of streams on a journey down.
Gullet, feathers swallowed as by a snake working the bulge of a whole duck,
His pasty paddles webbed and swallowed last.

Grass seems so endless in its cycles, democratic and dumb
In its mounds pushed aside for our roads,
Ever knowing that the down ground bides its time
To water the grasses in good measures and bad,
Waiting out the lean with its tough, dry seeds we like to crush and
Bake as flour for our bread, so
We water and harvest ourselves thinking maybe later
We will have time to dig deeper.

Everyone loves to start a journey down,
Like the laughing water on the mountain
Before the freeze pauses their motion.
Down by the mapped valley – the social world
With Inns and way stations and schools,
We love a parade and a river starting to brown in its breadth and depth.

We think things might be telling us something
With their trickles and metaphors, something we can show
For all of the bulk of our thinking so.
And do not say it is nothing,
A breeze on the water of her kiss in the sunlight,
Her lips slightly dry and chapped for your moisture.
Boy, girl, wife or man – the run of the river is still talking,
Never twice making us see this reading of things
Before moving on down the page or adrift,
Pulling up to shore, stepping through the wet to camp.

Stay a little longer,
Something sweet to say,
Singing your inner perfect, everlasting life
As long as the song of grass
That feeds the lazing cow by the shallows.

Be brief, be tried
Be as bees in season
Solemn as the precious nave of your sleep
Ticking along the rest of rocks
Wet by the shore.

By Rolf Stavig
10/15/22