Green eye of land lying flat as the eye can see.
If only the grass were everlasting, only the fittest shed messy tears
All over the place like the river languid with bulk and mass sliding
Like a snake does by swelling its belly and surface scale as the current pulls and
The dead wood and debris catches in the snag,
Dead fins, lines, darting light on the surface of our surfaces, just a hint below the optimal flow,
Where old Walt Whitman watches with angel wings for Christmas and the blood,
Thick as pudding.

A terrible loss for the seasons, a game of gain and loss on the water table
Torturing for just a slice of knowledge like skin, like the great salmon
Making her way against the current with her own load of roe.
An everyday Joe paddling or on the float of sesame, opening,
Of whirlpool, graves lost in the grass of tumescent America and her
Ode to tranquility and progress, her big shoulders and brown skin,
Her leotard of leopard print daring wire above the water, above the crowd like
Two buildings not built to fall, coming down as poisonous dust, sirens call and
The endless accounting of our paper trail, random sails to ticker tape the dirty disaster
Of the city already rising like the rent with her leopard and fin, fist drunk
With the money of the end.

Pay up front. Pay out back you bloody Veterans trained to say as much,
Out back, in the West, camping by the over pass.
Dissolute and continuing the fix for frays on the banner of prosperity.
Shine bright on Sun. Lamp light moon,
Conundrum of the hot spring, thunder of the Super Volcano twitching the skin of the land,
Laying another man’s claim of upheavals to come, that have come and gone
A thousand times to change our faces, one to another, rowing,
Taking stock of the language store and its reflections on the door of light and
The trap door, sure as dirt to hold oil and water,
To bide time herself as the cradle not to be heard
For fear of waking the baby, arms and legs akimbo or
Spread eagle in sleep as open as a crucifix
And a carpenter with nails tucked in the corner of his lips where his teeth hold,
Building the vocabulary of sacrifices and their worth.

Where the thread pulls and the carpet of the sky begins spooling out,
Raveling up and waiting just beyond, as a void might lay with absence
Determining the present with idea of a blank extension, a canvas for the flicker,
A mind for the darting eye. Now is the time.
Intuition to seize the grim face carved in the portico
As you notice the purse of the clay’s lips, the shadow of the dark interion peeking out.
Her bruised body and the harp chord and the resolution unanimously passed
To defend ourselves from war,

Paste belly, back brace, you borrowed so cheap as they loaned easy and
Leaned into the munificence of the science like an eye on the sky.
How could we not believe, when looking up, all of our faces were wet,
Our forts left in splinters by the wind that just moves on,
Morphed as demon’s hair, as a tie to bind us together again.
The nation at war with red ribbons and pale sunken chests,
As the slab, the butcher’s hook, the dream we had of our chickens scratching,
Our night blossoming pink clouds as the white moon sets in blue and grey
And the West is the home of our infinite retreat where the void knows its form
And the glass on the mantle is shaken and the grief of onlookers in suits is
Tempered by the handful of soil they must hold for the ceremony.
Grounded we like to say. Throw the babes out with the bath,
Ave Deum, Rectus Sanctum
Now we lay us out to sleep
Just as her dawn winks its light and the jasmine flower is pressed to the idol.

Before us lies the truth speaking the tongues of babel,
Crashing the carts with rushing wheels, hands free,
Mimicking me to tell how the rodent and small mammal years led to hands,
Now folded wetly in prayer, their treasure of dirt in the eyes of the beloved,
Blue as a dress in the sky weeping its anger out,
Shuddering our foundation hole as if
The safety of bombs lay in their falling.
Our very bombast an orgy and coming together green and
Spread as clean laundry flapping and the flag,
Red, white and green with its wheel and symbol, once named,
Useless as all shattered things to suggest what still sits
Where once we had our glory of being a form in use
Suggesting now its opposite and the opposition
To our naked achievement, our love embodied,
As a nickel in a drawer
Or a veil over her dark eyes
Asking after the remoteness of our differences persisting, perspiring slightly.

The fog above a distant river,
The outskirts of a congested city just waking
As a resident’s call to prayer,
As the untold pulls from the unending
Seeming never to have met,
Meeting again
As a pebble might sink in a pool.

By Rolf Stavig