Dilettantes and fetishists await the turn of patience with shiny things the crowd might

leave like a steel hoop at a construction site, a barrel wrap, a passage back to how

things went from then to now.

 

To uphold their pleasure, the links of illusion must be sure,

As the tepid grey bath water waits for a third user.

Old ideas for naked bodies that even lotions and powders find wanting.

 

Evening feast is peanut butter and milk or ham rind and fried egg on toast.

She opens the eye of her yolk.

You know her as the one who swallows pearls or the hat pin waiting for a knitting needle

And the circle is bursting with clairvoyants who paid to get in.

 

When things are set up just so, there is almost no denying it,

her pasty maneuvers at the table with minions of the dead crowding the windows

tapping like a tree to be in but all the while rooted, season on season,

in the ground where a tree should be

like the dead ones in a little shelter,

found like the lollipop tombstone of a baby who went by fever and whooping cough.

The causes don’t matter much but the horn is passed around.

 

The tuba sometimes has to lead.

The drone of vina sets the space for the sitar’s daring and fluency,

Her acrobatics and ebullience in seeking out weeping poets to be milked like goats,

Cured as a fine cheese and toasted for light brown sandwiches later.

 

You have all come for now, I know.

I know my own breasts are worn and leathered, shown and noticed by no one,

Covered like a shoe by worn leather and I warn the front rows about the possible smell,

The stick of things to you when least expecting a memory to form as the focus we say

Is here and now.

 

Lead up like the big roller coaster hill of anticipation, clutching clammy hands,

Paying extra.

Tunnel of love, hall of mirrors, bright blue sky.

Enervated and humble, together and alone,

Song on lips of sweet kisses with air fresh as Spring waiting on the verge of

starlight fading,

and her dawn motions you in like a levitation,

a metal ball in the act of being violated, as nature and her laws, smooth as pie,

360 degrees, we turn left and, feet off the floor, proclaim this the door

and speaking is as talking does,

out the window with birds and trees and sentence after sentence,

movement after movement

of the horn at the rim of fire, the hoop red hot in contemplation.

 

The swoon of woman and man is the dirt once moved and the ocean rushed in

and the players raised the level of the land,

like a house on stilts in a deluge and

The bare tops and fulminate bottoms grieved the fallen short and

Typed like mad monkeys on the rhythm of the forest,

Salvation, all putty in the hands of a great sculptor

Leaving the brink of the bridge unfinished for each in the roiling crowd

To find herself and make of her baby and her man the traipsing outlier and aftermath,

The contemplation of the cup on the table,

The desires of others and everything.

 

Really only one thing that the poet said, locked in horns of a minaret

In miniature on a table, a kind of Taj Mahal for the tourist on looker

Where the bright dead receive unction and the passage of the mourning lover

Is as the morning of the girl touching the bee live glade

Of the hearts lively hive.

 

The sun yellowing now as the faithful stare into it

With thoughts of black negation, overcoming reason

With stones stacked and the crumbling of foundation is me as much as you

Giving way when all is lost and found and lost.

 

 

By Rolf Stavig

10/2024