It reflects nothing of you, me,
The something deeper also a shade shying away like a light in the night.
Equivalencies of relevancy as the tuna on the line, the last of her kind,
The King already chum in the murk sunk.

The Golden idea of the people sailing, voting,
Finding harmony beyond war is rotting propaganda,
Now ablaze, now a rope, a knot, a noose.
America’s decline is premature.
Ignorance and adolescence and the addling of the adder’s forked tongue,
Spliced, comeuppances craven as nouns having a place by the fire that is smoke
Billowing from a pile of tires at the barricade,
The top of the sink,
Opening down like a hole into hell.

Give us hope.
We are young, our hands hold what minds create from the sun’s boundless energy.
The economy in tatters
Strewn like bailing wire and twine and the brine and the bilge of our glut and spill and
Pieces for the engines are out in some ship in line for the dock
Where the canal is the cue for the cargo to carry stalled hopes by the ton
Sealed as a crate, a bale of last year’s hay, blackening in the rain.

The money won’t come in time to save us at half its proclaimed value –
Twice its bartered price, its battered door at the griddle face of our pancake,
Sticky and down trodden as a snot baby tied in the lake as bait.
Graft and seed, mummies and daddies and dandelions in among the rail yard irons
Raised by glue, solder and weld in the sculpted wing bone left
As by a terror bird of the Miocene.
Jut jaw and blood scarf, chip shine and time,
Managed, hourly, daily, hold of the freeze on the river
Giving thaw by chunks that heave and lumps
That leave blue black bruises
“In the blue black bowels of the bank of Ulster”. *

*Finnegans Wake, pg. 398 by James Joyce

Rolf Stavig 2-26-2022