Follow the glow as a gong along paths bleak and dim,
Slight and slim is the girl in the gross world,
Things lean inward to mirror what?

Ginsburg skull fallen off its pole,
Old rolly poly in the cemetery dust below Naomi and Allen.
All is below, abruptly blooming chasms, traces, lamentations to
The ears of emptiness that seem so patient yet waste us so freely.
Giving all, what can we expect but emptiness, a gleam in the eye,
A purse long folded black as a wallet in the top drawer
Once so close to your ass with its leather,
Now outlasting your always slim physicality,
Like a girl putting on healthy weight,
Souls slipping from the back end of the world
To an unbuttoned top, a loose ended bottom
Where spirits track diarrhea and catch up wheat in sickness,
Smut of corn fungus to find us, you,
Liberated in the bones of hibernation, ending so completely,
Burning Atman with Atman to shine black as roses still hunting for their blood.

Blood still nursing,
Crowds still milling,
Your baker’s smells,
Your tie die effluent,
The mugger with the trots in your Upper East Side garden of the timpani,
The shirt waist fire, the immigrants in shoes of leather, clots of milk,
You jogger, clap hander of the opera, tennis gum shoe reporting on traces
As fire works fade,
As the good spirit rests
But in quietude the thump rump of brain butts up against passivity in death,
Not the engine of Karma, but its release,
Eternal as no mind for silence,
Folding another Universe into our own,
Our little place,
Going for nothing.

Not knowing so deeply, sweetly
Dead to froth,
Alive to your ever loving minds trailing behind like dogs,
Pets or wolves in the pre-dawn darkness of a vast overgrown park
Of Central trees hanging leaves and buds open as
Black, inky lichen spilled on granite,
On hearts promised in meditation to be ready!!

To be sheared, bald pate, cue baller,
Ransom wear for the far flown, gabblers, walkers
With an eye to the mind’s set.
A collection of odd numbers to match color, sky, taste of bread,
Your beard after eating crumbs.
Taking crumbs into you, now napping,
Hot, wet, dreaming.

Taking up the last needle of medicine for convicts
Curled up on the far shore like ropes curled or
Ladders cured of their aspirations.
Every picture indebted to Velasquez,
Every portrait done in mud and ochre, amber and glue.

You feather, you brush with dusters and powders and
Eye shadow stubs cleaned in turpentine.
You made your mark,
Table top talker taking a walk by the blue,
The path of grass,
The fall of the future when we all vote for now
As once the painter forgot all lessons and
Found perspective framed as a Master everlasting,
Now gone.

Now lucky as an upturned horse shoe,
Holding her water,
Keeping the peace like a pregnant belly,
Blooming eyes inward as a lazy susan,
A black eyed remonstrance,
Yellow flower I can’t remember your name.
Black Eyed Susan,
Woman reader,
I have become the same as the blinded painter, the deaf Mozart,
The never dead Ginsburg dying to be released
From painful ecstasies of creation black and endless as
The center dot of all lazy daisies in the wind.

By Rolf Stavig,
4/16/2022