Old Uncle Walt, what comfort you might give, we give to you.
Who conquered your grave and ailments in a stillness.
No Army band on the ramparts but sun in the morning range
Chasing the moon back to the hordes behind the hill
Raising the feet one over another,
Over the dirt of the rhythm of the world.

Coming so close to your beard to feel bacon on your breath.
The yellowing world of liver’s failure,
Eyes pinched by your own fingers
Red as rails in sunset rust or
Cold, unused iron black at night.
Such slag your would carry up the shore with men and bales,
Women alert to the scale.
Such comfort as age brings,
Withdrawal over engagement
As the needle of the compass finds true mark on the map
Moving armies and the dead to rest or eat or get out of the way.
Your way as balm to your own wound,
As Jackal medicine to the fleet footed well,
Cut between their fingers and toes
To leave a red print on sand stone.

The blowing incessant,
Of flags that don’t reach but furl and bloat their same color,
Red as the fit, white as the dead.
What to do with your yellowing mangle of face
But cupped by calloused hands,
Printed like a tattoo with the blue and black ink of your lids,
The invidious forgetting the furrow, the worry,
The row with seeds you planted
That no one can quite steal or show
Because they don’t care to look,
To raise your fat man’s beard off your dirty neck,
Your throat closed over intact with a pack of song
Like meat or tongue or back of a lower, taut, straining man,
Diametric, no longer perpendicular to this world,
Grazing as the bovines who feed innocently
Before we slaughter them
In the spirit of sacrifice
That gave men to the ditch,
Women to the chopping block of their hearts.

The post mortem reads out like the scream stumps
Of live, awake amputees in the surgeon tent,
Just above the same wet ground you consecrated
With the song of the dawn and her weeping cousins.
The feathered and shelled ones,
Gone as sure as your old man body
To sky and her, refractory of teal and lavender in bloom
Just above the road,
In a field of phlox and bees.

Knowing how free and hoarse is the call and gurgle
Of the choking dead on the table,
Never with us, not known again
As the rut in the road displaced the wheel.
As the face of the moon utters nothing,
Speaking even of light is superfluous
As you plumbed sheer extent,
Bathed on a deeper black back
As the river laced with her eddies
Coughs up reflections,
Babbles as the baby current
Pulls in the little waves
Pressing so gently on the skin of your shore
As the absolution of terror
Within and withdrawn from that self-same dark.

By Rolf Stavig
12/21/21