We fell off of the plane where existence rests so sweetly
As palms up at the lap of the sea counting the crashing waves,
The blessed beginnings where number falls for her shortened cousin,
A smudge of the horizon as a moon rise or the thumb of a stranger
Blotting at the distance or a corner of the sky’s eye
Leaking petals to the wind that tugs and tussles us.

The brute fact of all our indicators,
All of our ambitious plots or just one,
First-to tell the child of her mother’s infinity,
The grass still leaning against the hill.

Tell it again, a second time,
Tell the grave cradle that we wouldn’t meddle
If things were not so perfect- requiring us,
As the song goes, to start a third line, a fourth
As a list of lists,
As breakfast for the barnacles who eat like a sieve,
Like the baleen of the great whale filtering,
The sound of her huge body
Leaving the water one more time
Like the soul being born to a hurricane,
Like a spring all wound up with tension within,
For the clearing distance required to escape our element.

Left wet again on the close shore of an intimate, departed cousin of mine.
Old scar, young belly holding to the salty rock of your trials,
The ages adding one by one,
Noticing the cigar thumb of the dealer on the scales of our ambitious plots,
The used car and the mop tops of dandelion letting go the globe of her seeds,
The semblance of need to find just a crack for dirt in the city
To sprout weeds, even in Winter,
Green and red as rhododendron, holly berries,
Bruises burst beneath the skin
And the spat of blood is as a spill on the cold porch of locked doors.

The knock against believing is being a fool for the tide
Drawing us out in her grey,

Precipitating determination to keep all and return the slight flakes,
Carved and frozen, keep the little drops
That rose as rain to cloud
To keep them close and make us one going under
Without consent or drift against the shrill scream of gulls diving
Binding like thread, the invisible lines of the space between us and below,
Lit like fiber optic, belly soul between us and all.

By Rolf Stavig

Writing with Cancer group 12-14-2022