Perfect capsule, white and forever,
Blank space shuttle hibernating compartments
Like suicides measured in their bunks
With allotments specific to each
For their pills and ideas of the worlds to come.

It all depends on where you stand and sleep and measure.
It depends on your perspective.
Looking back like a genealogist we can starve out the details,
Reconstruct mothers of a hundred generations,
The crying whelps, the creaking ships,
We can see before our eyes as you might see now,
If you have the perspective
Looking back and forth before you cross the street.

Warm coffee, good loving, we wouldn’t want to be late
In constructing ourselves as the wooden viewing platform
Where cameras can be like politicians and
Tell us the obvious hiding right behind our eyes
In the misgivings of knowing your own mind.

The circles of the ancient track
As orbits, as rivers bend over time
To the low spots of the land and become lakes.
We become lakes and aquifers,
Forests of fir trees and
Soft floors littered with needles and pills and advice.
Grandfather, Grandmother,
Baby yet to say all, and we, and the land, and the sky. and the path,
Restless of the mind to resistless at last and first
Before the makers of space time end it all
Somehow in a new beginning, not us,
As we call for soul, reflection,
All in one
As we scatter sand, shot, bump, sleep.

As we rise each day and sleep each night.
As we wonder about our neighbor,
Her hand and beating heart.
Cue up, it’s time to go outside,
Call up, shake out,
Dendrites,
It’s always time for something and something more.

By Rolf Stavig
8/07/2023