How from the personal to the universal, transpersonal,
Caring about something,
Some not me from the confines of mind I seem to carry
And impose everywhere.

Grey suit body, doubling our sad sack of trouble,
Troubadour number of the stage or in the back,
Rehearsing.
Pulling the thread of the covers, the loose string of pajama and
Right where we were made,
Transient, breathing hard in humid heat.
Let the yard go back to nature – weeds, compost, work.

Rash decisions, monuments and moments,
Elevator stare
Lining up.
Why do we need this clinging, hanging together
As death do us part.
Playing the part on the path by the mountain in a circle
Led by a lover of the past, a shade, a shadow, a memory.

CGJ
Enough for now in a city of millions,
Each in her own way.
Each inheritor of all, differentiated,
Manifesto, sympatico, Bellissima.
All to the window, all to the hall, the dance, the dress
The tickets bought.
Why should we not arrive, splendidly elaborated, feathers
Travel ridden, blessed.

The reason is the fortune of open continuity,
Inherent in expression of limits by vastness,
Intimacy by deserts of sameness, place names
In written memory as her trunk full of letters,
Their bunk bed for twins
And the talk turns to colleges, tradition, achievement, exclusion,
Articulation of one with another like knee cap with the humerus or tibia and
All of the bones of the feet walking.

So worthwhile to dream a bit on it,
The possibility imagined
Of all its power come to visit us
As the crest of immense waves,
The stamp and imprint of our self importance
Subsumed as someone else’s ambition,
Possibility, imagining the body politic,
The follicles of tiny hairs just inside the ear,
The joints of your thumb with its nail and tack
Alongside the skin covered fingers
With their wrinkled knuckles.

Imagine the water and
That with this planet – three quarters water,
We could not have enough.
Enough to give, or water the plants, when it falls free from the sky
Or goes ten years like the Atacama, without a drop.
Imagine reading the minds of dogs, leopards, birds.

The path overgrown but over used,
Routine, typical, too new to be yet of use,
Yet used we are, green as shoots,
Pulsed with a humming family, an infancy of the past,
A romance of the meetings of tribes and war,
Settlements, outcastes wanting more,
Staking a claim on life’s very breast,
Not quite the best
But willing to destroy in a burst of creation.

A burst of us crying our eyes out,
Wearing our skin to wet, pink, peeling blister
With the rub,
The counter point to chaos
In the minutia of the definite, the desirable,
The lost plethora of last year’s and next year’s
Inimitable attempts,
Shaggy bard pointing like a God from the feathered filigree of the ceiling,
Catholic, kept like a slave for display of dreams,
Like an oracle to make men move,
Like a woman working every day of live long life,
Uncompensated, unbeaten but as the wings of butterflies
Still in huge numbers never counting on the bank of moths and
The river of steel head trout and
The mouths taking flies off the dimpled surface of waters immeasurable and
Still somehow, not enough.

Shriveled bard, broken arrow,
We put on this show before.
In the park, before millions
Summarizing their season as, “It was great”.
We packed up and moved on to the next town
With all our feet and tendons and tissues and
Memories, smooth as frog’s gullet, expanding with a croak as
The mesentery holds the organs and
The eyes keep back the mind and
The ears hear all the time
About how it goes and where it went.

Where we went when we had the money,
The time, the leisure to explore.
Those days are going,
Out in the weedy drought,
Out in the rust bucket oil field
On a hot day,
Diplomatic about
The tempest and the end of days.

By Rolf Stavig 8/05/2023