Arrived at the circle of beginning
As so many laid down to die.
So many shape the space of ground and sky
With their dream stages, built places,
Wickiup, of sticks leaned together,
Contrails, cut lines, they diffuse by the moon and
We own the one who owns us for a moment
Of her fresh, pleasuring insight, her forearms and
The can of nails for the muscle
Under his hairy bare chest to tense
With lifting labor, back breaking in the sun.

They take a break together
As a pitcher of cold water and fresh bread.
Tell us of the wine and the sacrifice,
Of the old grey mare and the Dead Sea donkey
Trundling as with a load of bricks on an incline
With a faulty cart and Vesuvius
Ready to spark your mind
With its fertile and dangerous retreat.
A room of one’s own
As the geese see it a thousand feet below,
On the margin,
By the skunk harbor of the irrigation ditch
In the weeds that scratch outdated notions
Of ownership and the determination to go one way,
Inward, before turning back as a smile in the sun.

A mile below, the grey rock feels the weight of mountains,
Fissures, the living ones on a surface of sand,
Below waves of ocean never still,
With a project we imagine as both preservation and forgetting.
This is how carrying on goes about its children
As on the vast plain of the stage,
Telling stories of before hunger and after.

The others of the door may be our extended family
As sure as the fence of enemies,
A wall a thousand miles long,
A grief a thousand fathoms deep and turning,
As a head upon the pillow, snuffling up sleep
Like years of grass weeping
In the whispers of the grass above the creek land
Where the sediment of floods covered all the graves.
The blanket of snow on the land is no memory,
But here and now, cold and real.

To write another tale of the wake and
Ode to the sea dead wastes of time tickling and
Littering the shores with our diligent work of memory
Is to temp fates with aspiration
When all we typically grasp is continuation
Colored by our wishes and fevers,
Clouded by the passionate misgivings of the others,
The nations and their concerns
With cultures by and for the goods sold, consumed,
Molded into the language of night films and drama
Where the lovers might meet their steady gazes
Upward yet level to each other
And the terrible silent gaps of our makers,
Mawkish beyond the dark silence of the skies
We imagined connected to us,
Before and after, eternally time present,
Enjoying the each and every of our tortuous, mundane
Yet salacious conundrum of love and its
Misshapen tools to fix upon our misguided projects
With a greater harmony
To the glory of All cheating death with the mystery of lovers
In subtle agony over the prospects,
Ship side or at the door, that we are parted,
They are gone, worthy of song
But dead and gone.

By Rolf Stavig
11/13/2022