That old same thing,
Nested as the groin,
The urge of one for another and
Her high call of existing.

Revolutions take time
As the blasphemers re-calculate sanctity
As useful and ethical when on the run
Or on the hunt.

Old house, new shoes,
The wheeling of the mind’s eye
With range as more of a number than a myth,
More of a break in the hedge
Like a dash – for language
Than a full blown stop of emphasis, period.

The country lane of the peasant dance where
Time present and future speaks of dead Eliot
Like a cat, a cat, a cat.
The noumenon now full phenomenal,
Gross to the eye, subtle
As the mind’s light of electricity
Bending in at the ends,
A string of quarks and light years enmeshed
In a family drama of conquest, submission and domination.
One flips and the other grins like the Cheshire cat on stage
With the Phantom and the killers and the blood that
Circulates our best in veins of blue with monks in sliver
And the flue where the chimney smoke rises.

The stockings hung,
Milking some blackened shape from beyond the window
That can’t quite disappear and
Hangs around like karma.

Like Zazen blooming,
Looming, light as paths not taken
Holding the open as if it had never closed,
Never quite conceived that print on her dress
Of biscuits and hibiscus,
Could travel and explain like music’s math,
What it takes to be over the next hump
Before you arrive, at first unheralded and
Dense as honey.

Heavy as money not spent on enterprises,
Not hurried by affairs,
Carved as banister of Teek or Applewood.
The English in their tight compartments
Traveling by train or crowded in busses and tube
Or their great city, imagining the scales,
The ranges of achievements and degradations
With the present meal,
The burse in need of immediate aggrandizement.

Parliament is for speeches and
Who has the momentum of the need
Seeks to turn the tables, snooker the opponent
With bully right of rulers with the rules, left now,
Remainders of what rules past have shaped
Like a mother tongue.

The rust of Blake’s imagination is still good as gold
Laminate on the burnished pearl or apple wood of the mantle.
Lions at rest on their elbows at Trafalgar,
The sterling jolting awake from the latest free fall.

You sleeping Ophelia may never awake
But in the flowers of her hair, in the river,
Another Ombudsman keeps a grisly score and
An entertaining tale.

The tragic turned comic in a few short, well shod lines,
Trumpeting the colors like an awkward boy in shorts,
His white knees gleaming in the cold.
Who could give it all up and bring the bastards down,
But us, the empire come back, pyrrhic and angry
To the land that invented prisons and rehabilitation.
To break the poor like a harness, a yoke, the stocks,
The nine tails of nine lives and whiskey in a purple velvet,
The ox ankle, deep in mud, in the rain.
The splintered wood holding his shoulders and the cow
Pregnant, right on time.
I can’t out England England.

Sinews of Blake’s tree and dignity
In Princess in prime, suggested to the mind,
The possible wager –
Re-valuation as a new form of the book,
A stage set simply for players
In their best sign, making plays.

Of all values, composed, blessed,
Moved on, from each other, responsible,
Diverted, retrograde in our motions
Moving past one another
Like a planet, a demi-god of classical skies.
An outcaste of normal days,
The weather fretful, the words misunderstood.
Moving forward is almost inevitable in time,
While alive.

A few snorts and it’s over
But for blood and some meat.
Young Franklin to his prime,
With cuts and coat and Lucy the heifer
Still standing in her stall.
The unusual weather always and everywhere
A topic of talk, a climate of opinion.

What will it – our most blatant but subtle environs
Do with us next?
And what if we do calm or educate the mind
To perceive such things,
Such ones come dressed in feathers and ochre and mud.

Dance of rain, of the new given so tastefully,
As the seasons stretching the bounty of our arms and containers.
The belly is no longer enough, even great Bentley’s universe of stomach,
We need freight, storage, commerce and “E” money
To spin and purr and grow.

The solace, recompense of poetry
In stacking up the silences, murmurs of air in the fences,
Ghosts of a crowd, ever unsatisfied, greedy,
Tumultuous of feeling,
Whirl wind where we could be talking,
Resting our questions awhile – to feel better.

Easy does it,
Black as tar.
Something not so easy to say,
Harder to feel.
Falling from the sky to such a world as this.
Reaching back up against the weight of the waterfall.
Back to the ground, still alive!

Forward and back as pendulums say
And the river rolling,
The cats scrawling the couch with their claws.
The time of a pleasant nap mapped out against aspiration,
In respiration, each continuance a surrender of trying too hard
Or a silence.

To be deep and dark is the job of the night.
For us, eyes and spirit will have to do for
Taking us beyond things we no longer believe in.
Sun up, God watching, isn’t it pretty to think so.
Hemmingway drunk, sailing, bull fight critiquing, getting married,
No path for suicides, each suggestive and then missing.

Not missing us.
That is our job – resolute and joyless
At the task of making happy enough
From the sticks in space about us, requiring us,
As late for a lecture, we hurry.

The tabla tour, torturous passage paddling torrents,
Gummed works so each, ready in her own way,
Can be a one awoke to the need yesterday,
Pressing the seams today for the party tomorrow –
Together.

“That is how we fell in love, isn’t it?”
Beginning from the past, uncertain of the future,
A gamble of daring and truth telling
About the reach of ethical implications.
Confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance,
Isn’t that how we start to say, “Yes”?

With digression, retreats and speeches,
Balloon rides and panoramic views,
We tell of a solemn nave in a country church,
Visited on a tour, like the Hebrides,
Never to out English the English.

By Rolf Stavig 1/15/2023