You have made promises of honesty and walked away,
Forthright and head high in the degradation of honest self-reflection.
Without ourselves and the patina or tarnish of secrets, what have we?
Have we eternity in each breath of a word approximating
Or the sunrise or dark velvet of night’s rich dimension.

Sharpen the blade of perception, the pillow of reason and the engine of feeling,
With desire flaming combustible gas as the rocket with its vast tank of cooled propellent.
Take me, but have I made sincere effort to make of myself something worthy of giving away?
The gift of selves is as rain drops to the earth, snowflakes to the glacier,
Not much, but in the durations of time our ice is of the water itself,
Elemental to the oceans of living, the drifting of passing clouds,
Like ideas emerging, passions settling to a steady rain.
Grey clouds that keep the star light from us for a night.
Such we are to the futures of our descendants,
So much we know to be wrong but keep believing.
How can this artifice, this beauty be the glue to hold,
The nail in the coffin of beseeching or can we still be dignified
By calling it forth as a destination or investigation into fundamental properties,
Building blocks of our elusive selves.
Lay counselors to my bruised conscience, my lies shined like brass,
Like sunshine for antiseptic, like stainless steel for the long blades,
Grain for the calves, the slaughtered sufficient scape goats of our sin
Spread red all over with disbelief that being wrong could ever bear consequences.
Ever float a trial balloon of self,
Rumpled, faded, battered in the corner like truly dirty laundry.
Tell us more, tell us more, grave side with your mother’s soul,
Braid your hair maidens for a long trip by pony drag,
Or over the Spring ground, wet from lifting fog,
Let it proclaim subsequent arrivals,
Just as I am here and you are there,
To be as infinite, ambivalent, sufficient to no one in paid memory,
For remembrance is remonstrance with the pain and complaints of the living
Over and against the scrape of immortal need and concurrent human frailty,
Boasting the needs of nothing to fulfill itself again in us.

I want it (the writing) to be able to say “you” and love you.
I want the reading leading to writing, to your soft grounded ear.
Tell me of All feeling about for its intimacy (God’s).
To be in possession as the demons of concentric circles
Or concentration on infinity’s symbol,
Poor spiral of the circle twisted, back around to us,
To Uncle Walt’s question moaning on the battlefield,
The exuberance fled from the man like let blood.

Another shove, a pittance for a rhyme,
Is it really time to stage the Christmas Carol again?
I thought that we might have something more to say, after all.
Fallen to the scratch, the hieroglyph traveled far,
Shirt pocket bandit,
Valor of a red scarf, a brigadier confederate at the summit of nations
Telling the lie to souls immortal that the lash and dust don’t last anymore
Than young love and the aspirations of authors
Who seek to claim due of the sky while avoiding hail and the mudslide and the grave.
We all knew as little and such that the momentum is irresistible,
The gravel of grace and gratitude is but a splendor of our insignificance working away.
Tire and toil, tell me and tell me more.

That the nose follows the brain or
Leads us like the nose ring of a steer,
The senses are the brain in convolutions of evolution
Seeking light with the eye,
Remembering and talking with all.

Cozy all of the story
Sending up flares and sparks of the fire light and the runway.
The venue is crowded,
The table players bring food and the verse is just between us,
A Universe of conspiring, a punch line, a gaffe,
Like falling down or sneezing.

Don’t read too much into it,
Bold face for the paper’s text: It’s a fire and the alley cars are charred
By the burnt out hulk of a car and money is newly printed and
Must be printed again to restore confidences.
It must be long ago to make such tricks of the trade work again,
Like the bicep, the clavicle, the jugular.
We can work on it for awhile and then
Must lie down again like a crown kept in a closet.
We are barely enough even to borrow it for a while.
We are swollen, old, passing things on like unheeded, unheard advice,
As one might mutter, knowing better, to oneself.

Things like “earth and sky conspire” or that night gobbles its way through day,
Preponderant is the night, the vast stretch of nothing, not needing us,
Not wanting so strange a seed that the moment is lit like your eye,
The dawn of ideas finding others open, relaxed and well rested.

It’s all a vested interest.
Talking about all and meaning me,
Bright as a penny, a dime on your father’s eye.
In the rush to re-invent ourselves,
The fashion of having a self seems worn thin, oblong and irregular
As the reflection of barges in choppy water,
The play of leaves,
The rush through the tunnel of wind and train and smoke rising,
The trim of her wedding dress trailing to avail and time be told,
To no avail.

The ancient meter of mates as in the brush,
The wild ones skitter and in the ocean,
It is eat or be eaten.
So it goes,
But on this shore, about me, I have to say
To see how we trail away,
Not quite as grand in exceeding the simple maps of our desires and plans
As the intimate relation might wipe at your mouth,
Hanging just open on the bier or preparing, just risen from sleep,
To form the next trace of spittle and bone, helped by food, need and air
To be the word, the look, the known twittering, semblance of the work –
The play, beyond back and not quite forward now,
Not quite saying what you meant to say.
Still hidden in the bushes,
Still plying the margins on a sail of wet skin.
How much and how many and the beat goes on
To crumple up the drafts for the can,
Unrelenting critic of excellencies forcing moments to put up and
As the sash, so the neck struggles to breathe, to swallow,
To support the head like the tiger just waking
When the jungles were young,
The earth endlessly making rounds
Feeling security lapse,
Prior to invention,
Roaming the eons, aimless but powered,
Hot on us, today.

By Rolf Stavig,
11/26/22