To hoof, to wing, to humanity’s early days,
The archaic, the imagined, the dream time.
Solstices and elliptics where the math describes mass
Which bends space, which moves mass as if by gravity.
Not all things turn back on themselves.
I think we are more open ended,
Infinite, astronomically speaking.

Waging the inner peace, a Sunday of suns
As the water drop, the torture, lest we forget.
Tribulations indecisive of the momentary gamble between us.
Robert Bly in your Spring, your time, your earth.
Opened up your skull from its night time,
Elapsed with your eyelids and grumbling
Old man beard to scratch at the door
Like unfed farm animals.
Best case scenario for Minnesota.

Blast of the past when the ice encroached the heart,
Pains held lips, dust rested lightly on the water, on everything
Light as flurries, dandruff, missed opportunities.
All those men paying for a stadium.
We always imagine that we are further along than we are,
Yet somehow already arrived.

The Minnesota river near Blue Earth, Hamlin College,
McCallister on the pipes and your lyre so sweetly calling,
Your rhythm undeniable.
You need no praise, as all of us, humbled from the start,
All wadded up with everything.
Dressed in black for the misplaced, half done laundry and
The imagined chill now overheating like underarm sweat
Or left out food.

Can you burn those frayed, split ends,
Mend up the hump to get over.
The star shine of the river shore sliding its sound
Of ice moan and tree crack, limb fall, silence
After the woof of snow, maybe a dog at your side
Suddenly alert
Like the darkness that holds your threat and your promise.
I would send you a letter but your age and fame seem blinding.

A letter of the spheres is all, one poet to another more intimate,
More free to lay our business on the table.
That business of recollecting,
Snuffing, holding still maybe a few months through Summer heat
To June evenings, table cloths used even in the out side air
As women might arrange for the betterment of us all.
Time to lay aside such tasks and concentrate on me.

You, I mean, to have something to say about the curl
Of broken, hanging spider webs in light but mostly
With a slight breeze of abandonment.
A freedom of the air,
Always dissolving a scent to greater limits
Until there is no smell but the next,
No time but now
With old man’s calligraphy and stained pajamas,
The perfect dot on the negligent “I”.
The phrase floating off like the moon from its planet,
Each year, each rotation a few millimeters further away
And the view from there is the letter “i” stripped of meaning,
A stick and a dot.

A plate carved,
Not yet in a museum,
Its hieroglyph still alive in pen and chisel,
Carving Neptune’s beard in the morning butter,
Golden, imaginary, trailing off into toast’
Making more of something she said once,
As much the inner feminine as the woman, handing you.

Believe the short comings, the brute end.
Ends of man like the same butter smeared or even rancid
On wood, now a fence and a rut,
The land trailing off in the field, Paul Celan,
Of tragedy unhinged from meaning and
Austerity is too clean a word,
Too much an account, to address the depth of loss,
The suicide of ends on scales
Past reckoning with anything but sadness,
Broken by loneliness,
By the dark that folds out and not into itself.

By Rolf Stavig
3-24-2024