Awake and barely a notion still breathing from sleep’s satiny wings,
The lids boiling water on the stove transforming our liquid to steam.
We all pass away.
What of it on a beautiful Spring morning,
An everlasting of briefness,
A heart beat hurrying a little to evince some mastery or mystery of perception.

To perceive the waking world,
The odor and small captured as in the tad pole or spider eggs hatching their many,
The spawn at sea adrift and
The little turtles or crocodiles coming from their eggs in the sand to seek out and
Horizon, tide and moon to guide by.

To spend some time outside they say, has its benefits for the mind.
Having a home, a blanket and some family at the sleeve and table also
Has it’s “growth factor”, reassurance, safety.

Measure me not but know as the sand grains number the stars and years,
We have come vast to the deep that casts its stow aways over board,
Its lightweights to the wind and her zealots to the fire.

Saying is a kind of knowing,
Even as lies, as it is intention, influence pressed from one to another
As the shadow knows the spirit of the stairs and
If we could manifest all we say,
The chaos written in blood could have no container.
We are contained.

As by sky and land and tendons going dry and brittle,
Our book has its cover, a middle and an end.
Our thrum on the computer or broadcast reproductions of the stage
Televised to the space station, we have our limits.

Sure, you know yourself.
Have you tried dialogue?
Whisper again to your puppy, “Be still”,
Contemplation is over rated, empty
And based on hash tags and thin gruel,
She is the fat man’s feast,
The thin woman’s wire and
If we all have a soul coming through our belly buttons at birth,
Think not on it,
Amniotic as the sea,
As the rustle of leaves and breeze and me on the radio
Years hence, slightly off tune and
Buzzing with the cosmic background radiation.
See how she slowly slips away, our soul story,
Dressed in rags on rainy streets or
Bridges over cold rolling water where Ophelia
Once felt for her flowers or where
Petersburg regretted her Neva, drained of the desolate swamp,
Pointing us that way, ever darker, ever lower and away
To join up some day, a juggler in a tipsy wheel.

The circle turns,
The day seems knighted with her promises.
The stern sward unwavering, talking and
Talking of the silence and the wind and
What she intended after all, when done
Or only just begun, again.

By Rolf Stavig

5/26/2024