Gonna have to and then some
To get over the hump of myself and on
To some greater or lesser spoils,
Like age or compost,
Fermentation or relaxation of our cellular bonds, our systems, our ideas.
The Greater Antilles washed increasingly by high seas,
We can hardly claim that all islands are threatened
Since we can speculate where they come from and where they might go but
The people, the people are another story.

Not quite the animals we know but close and related cheek by jowl.
The bump of the camel in stride, the shin connection to foot pad and knee
On the wrinkled dry skin and toenail of the elephant,
Pads and hoofs for moving in the sands and on the shifting muds and
In the floods we cause and the fires.
We are tools of the calamity, victims and not the crisis itself as
We believe in the fated hand, the jeweled ring and limp wrist
Of Michael Angelo and his man, so relaxed with woman,
With time confined to the Sistine Chapel.

Outside the bushes are burning,
The quail and doves have lost love and in the wind all of the names are forgotten.
Write fast, meet now for the black smoke and the whites of election and ruin are
Running with the red blood of the bulls in the streets with the yellow fever and the
Golden sun, bigger than ever, making some of us feel small.
Some smell fear, some danger, some in a back bower, Pacific with escape
Find the little hare, the pig and his sensuous lips now free and browsing with the cow.
Such is the future so much like the past for now.

It is with us or left us and in bait and back alleys we set the traps that snare ourselves and
Make us imagine solutions to our riddle, machine intelligence on a distant rover
With his charge running dry and dust in our eyes.
We hold the egg, the chalice, the idea that to drink deeply and live in this blood,
We must and we may, put forward or pull back, hold our breath and our position,
One amongst the others, ravaging, scavenging what ultimately lays flat,
Slightly swollen as a bulge or a bubble.

Cosmic groin upending a generation of nuance and subtleties with an act
As the stage knows the knife, the lifting curtain and the wire holds the tension,
The precipice and the drop.

Hold on with your squirrel claw shuttling on the telephone wire,
Urgent as families in war, babies crying, star light fading to day
Or Venus emerging from her twilight.
She faces up to the gallery and proscenium photo
Crafted as a beautiful mask, a delicate receiver,
A blushing poem as a cloud thinning brisk in sunlight rising,
Reflecting on the swell of number and constituents of air.

Dashed in the sea,
Frozen in the drifts of high peaks
Or secure as an egg in a nest,
The bulge of creation, amoeba, fetus,
Hope of silence for so much more silence
Spread so thin and vast and dark,
On the face of the black dark
Some dot is squeezed to infinity
Both down in the small and out
In the shiny membrane veils of emptiness as the bride’s eye,
The lace and grace of tapestry,
Woof and weave of veldt and plain – equaled only
In sheer extent as her time bides development and
The tinge of anticipation is also the pull of regret
From the lost time when unity had her company
In the empty nothing before being could even budge its bulge
Now expanding in explosion and implosion of the quiet regard,
Her ethic of beauty, transitoriness and pains
Vulnerable as a soap bubble glimmer
Reflecting as the sky and
Her demand of the passing cloud to stand and rain with us
As if it had ears and feet with which to walk with us on our way.
Our impossible plea to get out of the way.

By Rolf Stavig

11/24/2024