No question of identity, achievement, ritual in poetry and a healthy career, family or legacy.
The steeping pot, the morning sun or rubbed hills or copper shined by a wheel,
A wheel that wears me down as much as enthusiasm has your taste for glories or needed things
That wealth might buy.

To be done saying no and to question the substrate, deep time of our being.
The facts laid as evident elude and elicit from the minds, the look of a puzzle,
Apprehensive and questioning of a devoted and good dog.
Her precise prose, galloping detail as notes build harmony,
As people concentrate and squint up their questions,
Dangle a little conversational come on to the rapt attention of understandable selfishness.
How might we ever exceed the monism, the self reference of our perspective, but by talking,
Sleeping, opening our eyes to each other.
Black and grey the horses stomp around the hay, swishing their tails at the flies about the ankles
And for our eyes, we need shade, solitude, not so many people.

This leotard is made for flying and who sweeps up after the circus is as importantly sad, lonely,
Fulfilled as the pace of an elephant with a chain on his leg, shifting his weight back and forth
Like the slight jiggle of a planet in orbit making seasons with its chained moon.

We are all caught up in the web of circumstances, call it beauty, necessity, imagining or progress
But call it now in the song of ritual, the momentum, stops and starts of dance,
Sitting bleary eyed at the temple steps or shrine,
Ready to put a flower or bit of paste on the forehead of the deity,
Awaking each and all to the ease of her slumber accomplishing no more than appreciation of
Venus in her familiar morning star.

Are we not as one family of the molecules and forces existing,
Trying out in theory the necessities of law.
Natural law and blood on the floor, shavings on the hearth, insomnia, anxiety,
Trying it out for the modern age, immeasurable in every eye,
The poor more justified, the lonely are less tranquil but alert at times
As the light is to slanting promises made of another morning, transformative, continuing,
Leaving my plea, my exhaustion, my song behind
As the wave its foam, the wind its see through sky,
The Goddess her disappointments and crops, bugs,
Everywhere the seed, the nub, the rhizome, snugged in past our disasters
To laugh as the play is staged,
The article in her hand on the proscenium of proclamation
Like the square and the ten tablets,
I am in a cave abiding as the fool,
Painting the ceiling with hands and ochre pigment, smearing our bodies,
Shaking free the leaves and sweeping up like the harvest of money and plenty.

With making do, the children of another age make venture and claim
As Uncle Walt and the revivalists splashed about after the war,
Taking stock of our losses and the dead.
Exuberant Whitman worn to a nub in his old man nets, ready to die,
As sure as ever that the song in the leaves, in the detritus of severed limbs and shallow graves
Lusty as the lovers they held until our dogs have the time to dig up the bones and
Make something of us for the future, for a generation’s aim
As at the sucker of a baby in the mouth eye of Universal sucking,
Hibernation of a notion that still bides its time with us that
Space is a relation of being,
That time cozies in with eternity as a bubble,
As a membrane of the far shore meeting us in our ablutions and nervous habits of sacrifice,
The empty endless profligate and her statue modestly draped in beauty
Or dug from a dank tomb in hieroglyph of tribute, manifestation of the high and the paltry
And the poet, me, just another rubber ball with its unanswerable, blackened surface,
Neither stretched or realized but in its resistance of surface bouncing,
Sealed round as glob or globe,
Meltable night, nothing really in the great dark of everything,
A monism warped indeed.

By Rolf Stavig 10/01/2023