Empty space, doubt,
Negative space, as important to intuitive sense
As the glare through a dirty window, dust on the blinds,
Commonplace emptiness.

The little family at breakfast
Signs and with a day, now long past,
Shines the limit on her only son.
World rejuvenated for a thousand years of wars,
Groping for strength in mercy,
Kindness, benevolence, fatherhood.
Not to be complete, the human project is on to a future
To be equally unfulfilled, elegiac and speculative.

Monster of the gin closet,
Turkey gimlet, red holiday berries,
That old time rag of Sunday singing,
The call of getting dressed up and
Making way down the aisle.
You remember your clothes don’t fit and
Your children are uncomfortable,
Your mother may be home alone.

Little upswing of the market force and
The dropsy of her early weakness
Is taken up in the noon force of her hot, bright personality.
The cool reverence of self appreciation in the world.
Absorbency, spongy, fungal fructification, the spread of reproduction,
Replication, mastication beneath a leafy tree,

Of hominids and deer,
Of water in a changing season icing the clink of cold
On stream’s rocks and boulders big enough to sit on and see your breath.
My time done. Your time to come.
Little witness of the falling mist,
The turn to rain, to leaks, to shelter,
To rain with hours available to our talk, so we sing.
We memorize and rehearse the words.
The vowels as ambient as the consonants,
The syllables as laughing as the stream and
Certain as the night starting to spread his shadow wings,
A little death on our plates each morning for breakfast.
A little more at lunch.
Grave digger at the evening meal,
The readiness for prayer,
On our knees at all hours,
At all expectations uncertain as balloons loosed in the air,
The drift of sea weed,
The wave of trees in the wind.

By Rolf Stavig 10/24/21