Easter Island head for a trampoline
For the British Museum and their policy
For returns of stolen idols, slavery, colonialism.
A trunk of junk, bag men, Potters, collapsing sensibility
Onward as a decency of exclusion and privilege.

Her lips are sealed, Celtic, paleolithic, skins and complicated bait traps.
Careful where you put your fingers.
Easy does it and then a strike.
Decapitate the leadership.
A man, subject – like yourself, so unlike and yet so similar – keeping
A detailed journal of journeys. Keeping
The random scratch and art of the natives
Tracing a pyrotechnics of astrology, the better tools to see and
Predict us with for war and her finer cousin, Curiosity.

Roving around the beards of Mars, red as fire.
Sifting sands cup by cup, the infinite grains of the beach, the Sahara and
Stars uncountable but by persistent math, our eyes opened.
Our night eyes prized beyond seeing
With meaning, plan and wonder.
Wonderful say sad resolutions,
Timid at the death bed seeing what could be changing to something else for me.
Some pain at a sensitive spot, almost a shame, or
Truly a shame worth contemplating as it opens a door on origins like an Archaeological level
Below the basement of the church and the temple and the Roman we thought we knew.
It turns out to be older, deeper, measured in distances of time right here at our feet.

Big number, so little time.
Grave side, clay layers that the spade laid aside.
Totem head talking to belly button.
Star chart at sea with the urgency of the buckling astrolabe to find land, food,
Pressure release for a mutinous crew laying up finally on a black beach of volcanic land.
All land of course has turned over, magma, crystal –
Sand of the rock cycle, the granite pressed deep below, pressing gasses out,
Cooling slowly, heating, cooling intrusions again.

A meeting of the minds, stone holy, tipped, abandoned.
Home planet, cherished plunder later by someone to hold on tight
To page after page of description arriving at the thing,
Or the end of some meeting of the mind eventually like a river run or
The snake bird with feathers in its mouth – the plumed serpent
Consuming all creation even to its own eye,
Tail first swallowed as infinity swells everywhere at once,
All expanded to burst new time, new space, weighing on our temporality
As the first foot on land already inhabited,
Running with the blood of the last and the next.

By Rolf Stavig