Eat to live,
Negotiating the fines, the water boiling,
The family outcaste, refugee, sin in the eye of the beholder
Holding as each to their falsehoods –
As poverty of insight and belief in life.

No commodity on contested soil,
Emotionally each responds in grievances and hurt and
Violence like the dogs learned in the wild.
We can’t take them back into ourselves
Or out of ourselves now.
We are stuck with ourselves even as we change,
Even as we scowl and chafe,
Uncomfortable as forcing oneself to get up.
We get on with it, confronting the storm clouds of our making,
Like war.

Such short sight we have for each other,
Lopping off our most interesting aspects,
Our love, dim and selfish.
To write you the song of my heart and the dust that blows,
To recite the trite and push the blast,
Shade your eyes with a welder’s mask
As heat is another form of radiation, like light,
Like protons and neutrinos never quite liberated
From playing their part in our travels.
More dim, more soon,
I massage my eye balls with the backs of both fists.
I hope and like the man alone,
Hold to the bottoms of my feet, palms on soles.

May I borrow your body a bit for my ablutions,
My anticipation of pain,
As for all we unearthed of our past,
Both personal, collective, historical and tribunal,
In the sense that some hold books and fit us like laws
With the yoke of atoms and the light and the memory of being lightly,
Ever present as a dream.

She as the soul is talking of “Industrial Development”
Livestock, fencing, cars and gas.
It is a warm day.
It is plaid, cozy pajama pants.
It is a revelation that mind and crime and bared teeth and
Wrapped corpses and growing grass and breaking waves and
Night following day – It is a big reveal of sun and moon and
Each of us pedestrian in our time,
Lining up our options,
Our feeling,
Our band of brothers for the hunt.

By Rolf Stavig 11/19/2023