Close to us,
Skin and pulse close,
As wrist and tendons going into the hand,
The rings no longer fitting my slightly swollen fingers.

Sizzling fat and oil in a pan,
In the brain pan of the hominid band, outside talking.
Fear not which path or what you might say,
Unrelinquished, unsure, uncertain and
Then it ends.

Some other brother tries on shoes for size and fit.
Off we go or stay, camping, making music.
Fantastic glass, obsidian chipped to points and blades,
Stopping, starting on leaflets, stones, premonitions
Of us taking the train to the city,
Still late at night but starting to suggest early morning.
We came this way once and now we remember.

We have our faces, our allies and ancestors cool and crouched
Like book pages in a library of foolish dust
Covering up like a fig leaf if she only knew.
The mites and generals, the mice and the guitars
Still tight and leaned in a corner.
The drama of each page echoed by
The rubber step of the old guard making rounds,
Checking the stacks and aisles with a squeak from his shoe on the polished floor,
Here and there where people pass often enough to clear the passage of detritus,
Dirt, skin flakes and wind-blown ones that settle where the pace no longer carries
Like silt settling out from the stream.

The dream of your head on the desk
Having forgotten in sleep, what time you came.
You arrived.
That is enough to know and not alone, as they say.
Came together to get some things done.
Contralto making music of the spheres.
Roundness, supple, unblemished,
Fry bread, fruit cake, apples,
Honey banjo steeplechase over white lightning creeks.
Cantankerous mole feeling with his whiskers.

All is dark on the dark and
Someone must feel the way from within.
Inside the torch light of the cave,
In the pigment mineral dripping from ceilings and spires
Like the church of the absolute taken up in a slim girl’s fingers.
Her fine life and deft sense for the melodies
Beyond the corners of the bar,
Dimly lit bottles on the shelves of a den,
Corinthian leather,
Sandals, feet, bandages and poultice over the soldier’s eyes,
The geese across a cold sky making their sound like horns.

Mingus in the fungi.
Blues that made the descent from Milton to the underworld,
Back now,
Looking face to face with anyone who will listen.
Again tongues, throats, air and blood,
Lymph and cognition conspiring to bring us closer.

All together now
As the juke box flashes plastic smiles,
One round disk after another.
The morning light, the noon and midnight
Laughing up a successful jail break.
Free ourselves at last, pacing inside like a cat.

Prolegomenon, satire sad face painted for the show.
The open gutter sides of town,
A new flowering of personality and possibility,
Wavering between us, us and the litmus of the breeze or
A thermometer under your tongue.
How are we to know and as we do, the picture changes,
The scenes are rolled away.

Ten thousand years future
Where the harmony is still where the grass grows and the rivers flow.
Green light, yellow, red.
We know what to do.
Take a look at your hands.
Go ahead and find the fear.
Stand up the shame.
The water slides through the cut bank of grasses
Just beyond our seeing, but we can hear.
We can take up a cup in metaphor
As the in come free’s make believe.
Hands to the sky as the congregation waves.
Eyes forward with our heads.
The moment never comes to its crisis for everyone at the same time.
There is no sudden same time just as the crowd mills a thousand streets,
The band strikes individual notes and the marchers start to move.

Melt water, tributaries,
Spring tickling the dead with wet roots,
Sterile production free of our wants and designs
As the planets turn, the sun rises.
Blemishes evaporate or seep from the land
Because I don’t want to be left behind,
Don’t want the snow on my eyes
And the fog fits the purposes of my dissembling,
My beauty rank and raw.

Flemish originals hang robust in a series of ornate corridors and benches
For tired onlookers to rest on.
And on, we are hung,
Hanging we are,
Crucified, wrapped, put in the bog, buried,
Resumed in an after life by still useful tools and weapons.
Barbs, spears, the poet’s epitaph as grease in the rain,
Resisting shimmers, making way for the myth of nations
Conquering death as we lay
Like a dead horse in the underbrush, changing.

Star shine travels, twinkles from many years moving
To impact our eyeballs, our brains by extension and
Our nervous system has its outlay of associated passions,
Mysteries of being, common sense and advantage.
To feel better, walk slowly, look deeply,
Find out about going rates, fast or slow
In the bed of notions, selves, relationships.

The procedure steps can be didactic and as such,
Put to market at specific values, ideological, motivational.
This is not my phrase, not my talent, as the machine can do as well –
I welcome it to better me.
The prognosis is one of feeling,
Not therapy or ritual, thought, the slow muse of walking, singing,
Thinking of praise has its part.

Suffering, separation, unrealized potential, selfishness, vanity,
This is the horse, the legs that pulled and died.
Dryad of people sitting in chairs,
An audience, a congregation, a future taken up
In a rhythm of seance and nuance and color
Like a painter at her easel,
The light turning the color wheel to pitch,
To say that it is not this and not that,
So as to leave us, an open brink
Mirroring back from within
Some unimagined beyond like the star,
The upward press of our friend Dante
Finding in the ashes of the town, the river,
The resplendence fixed and then gone.

The modern river Styx is the Hooghly, the Rio Grande, the Amazon
From its animal jungle dark origins speaking no language we recognize.
Speaking toad and lizard to the nervous system, the spaciousness
Of flooded jungles under the water.

All things underwater, of air or fire, earth and time.
Plant life, algae blooms, moon dust, buried minerals,
Novae and Super Novae and the tug
Of the original, the eventual, the chasm unhinging the invitation
Wherein we are born,
Puzzled, lost, misapprehended.
I can’t feel too certain.
Blemish on the field, corn smut, fungus, bugs, meals.

Net it, let it go!

By Rolf Stavig, 11/27/2023