Body forth world from mind, mind from world with word.
Let it be praise. Let it be true.

Then the misfits of the engine fire entail birth pangs, the deaths,
Loved ones crossed as we seem to be
As one both free and stranded in the mutters of complexity
Gathered up like hay in a rick for value and sale,
Use and forbearance.

Town and country, home and away,
Lassitude for gratitude, the earth groans, not a care.
The travel through sky – Spitzer, Webb, Space telescope,
Shine nature of light- photons for the eye, hand and face warmed,
The green world growing with or without us, better without us.

It is we who invest so heavily in our consciousness and well-being, butterfly.
Our wings, pig, ant, grouse camouflaged as pebbles,
On the dust, nest of circle, dome of mind in
Contrast, the river swollen bites the shore.
Pieces of land dissolved, floated away but none really escapes.
Even space rocks circle and age with nothing to bump against,
So faint the traveling mass of photons or gravitons
Carrying only theory on wings and winds and chance.

Inebriate of the moment, long in coming, never fully formed but
By the past, the hope and the future.
Stellar wind on another kind of sail, the sail of the mind,
Proclaiming in weakness, form, in chaos – math.
The strong from the weak, the giving from the spent,
How much left us to come this far on the brink of our togetherness –
Fighting as always.

It is the little irritations and dirt, as in the cat box or corner uncleaned,
Stops our minds from wandering … - Where we can kill or conceive
The reprieve of an hour, a day, a life in contemplation.
Generosity of Spirit as a possibility, where it will go…

More the rhythm and the movement, form after formless,
Time and again, ungainly, after thought clenched.
The teeth and the honey, honey only a little mess between us,
A little spilled grain by the rail car, on its side in the snow.
Laid up hungry and cold again, we have to talk.

Pipeline of money, graciousness as fabled,
Mounted on the wall like a Bull Moose, one of a King,
Matted, preserved, photo taken – let’s keep going,
Mottled skin on the age of mind
And machine peering out behind,
Maybe it can operate the brakes for us –
Warehouse full of grain and money,
Fertilizer in Lebanon, Oklahoma City, why do you explode?

Sri Lankans touring the palace pool,
How old must the children be to enter?
Hide the garbage with a screen of greenery.
Can you write something like that for us?
For us, for the books, let’s move on.

Anything goes from string to soul in the architecture of elevation,
The collaboration of skyline and the river.
The pipe of music, the pump, the valve, the costs of the infrastructure.
A few good moves from a chess victory.
A few bastard children, just children really, outside.

A few for the pipes, the vibe, the sling shot hung from young shoulders,
The blast zone of nine blocks, heavy equipment.
Move it on over us. Cover me head to foot in ruins –
City, season, grass waist high in the margin ditch.
Sand blowing with dust home,
Out along the path by the trees.

It could all seem so simple,
Blessed fathers, captain tumblers and their wives with a job to do.
A lot of to do for nothing.
A lot of storms stretch virga and miss the ground in the heat,
The mist, the rainbow on the water fall,
The edge of safety worn as thin fabric, the veil if you will,
Between us. So much has come between us,
Looked out on us as from the shore, the ship RIP (rest in peace)
Recedes, its path cut by other vessels, other purposes crossed.
The sea has been crossed.
Pathless the navigator, the star, the moon in broken waters reflecting.
In simple tunes,
Again standing as on the deck looking,
As on the brink feeling,
As in the night breathing
The handful of thoughts you brought.

The path, the arc, the parabola,
The one who does not wander as the moral virtue of time is haunted
By other ideas striving to become thought,
Embodied by consciousness yet again.
Book, film, art
Embodied or embalmed again.
All said it had been said before but times change.

We brought some talk of ideas, mostly in the sack bagged,
Still feathered like a dead pheasant, mud on our boots.
Boats ply the river,
The road dreams subconscious water ways and mandalas of rest,
Wholeness, completion.
The heat builds and dying wind lets down the sails in a slump
Of our boggy, aging passion.

The litmus test of the light is a sentimentality offered,
Gassed in line,
Prose as promised in poetry to explain away fears,
Gather up the dark throats and slits of gizzard stock and monkey rote.
Rattle, fall.
Needle rush at the neck.
Blood red on the cardboard squares of voodoo ritual
Pragmatic as chess.

Why read, why tumble the saucer face
Of words in pantomime reinterpreted as
A clown paints tears in his makeup.
Made up of flossies and the sins of Aunties and
The knickers of cousins and the boxers in the ring
Beating each other silly.
Making each other punch drunk with singing.
Heavy muscles, oxygen starved, ambitious,
Rambunctious souls out for a helluva good time.

Drunk as logs,
Placated as a plaster mask, a body armor of papier mache.
The great give away of goods for bad ends,
Money, mugging, fuselage of the nose bent plane,
All Enola and Gay, frivolous but seriously stained
With murder’s shelf of papery, bureaucratic skin.

Of course we had enough.
No more.
Paint us sevens on top of sevens
For the good luck of rivers pouring down
Their spread on our heads.
A slow, dry in places, muddy process of emergence of land,
Burial in water, weighted with the space of time.

Grumble under the weight pronounced in stones
With emphasis on artistry.
All hold hands,
All fall down.

Ashes on the bloody, muddy banks where talking papers rain down
Like white leaves in the billowing cloud of the trade center falling,
The dirty air rising like pillows of smoke, handmade flowers,
Roses stuffed up nose like a Nimbus,
Like Atlantis finally laid to dream of the waves parting perfection
Like two tall thighs, crumbling glass behind the barricade,
The language of power roosting by the flooded shore.
The trash and detritus never transformed,
Never more than us here thinking and
Skipping stones across the way.
The green bridge, the freeway,
The answer coming back with the traffic
Building its sound of white noise
Or distant thunder.

“By the mother of the holy ghost, there’ll be murder” James Joyce Finnegans Wake pg. 399

Purifying clan of mongrel sousers,
Sanguine blades of another mother,
A mother mugging for the fug of damp blankets and straw.
Nothing left to eat.
Nothing left to do but the brevity of telling tales again
Like the traveler in a raccoon coat,
Heads and tails above the rest,
The ones caught in the grate of the drain after the floods
Or on the highway bridge snarled with broken houses, false legs,
Limbs of trees mashed by water like straw in river banks of mud.

We need a new bank, rich as land, red as the deficit
But hopeful in its lending.
The mother’s mothers are dead.
Have we ever been so alone,
All of the men milling about with their pockets on fire.
The women with blouses move in the fields
Like the wind bending and whispering to the rooted crop
That it is time to move.
Time for harvest and tempest,
Time of murder and truth.
That’s the stake used
On the judges table.

That’s the wrath of the talk.
Let down your hair, bounty lass, brave lads,
Take up the struggles of your nation.
Seven daunting sisters on the knife edge of melody,
Making surmise on her beautiful feeling,
Still aloft and shining.

Ear wicker, grass hopper,
Dun colored crowd by the river bank baptizing.
By the black entry of the golden pool
Making ledgers lie about how he laid down,
About her deposit
As an ovum in a sea of greed.
The sin of the seed in the blowing amber scent,
The sticky tree gum fossil,
The rent free zone on the very boundary of knowing,
Sending back epistles of longing for what we knew.

How long balance as the rye on a stalk
Or the wheat in storage,
How we knew the blue blowing sky
As the wind circled with snow and
The unfurl matched the back draft and
Fire was in her arms
Cooing like a baby made to last like chain and barrel.
You ear wick harvester driving the long line in the small hours of the afternoon.

All about the weather.
About the town goes the goose call, the fall,
The mother of the ghost, the shattered hope,
Tall is the money, short is the fund,
Hat in hand at the grave side,
Good kingdom
How borrow more in the ground crowding the whole host
From the sky, from the promise laid down to sleep
For now we wake,
Speaking of having to move.
And moving does as it goes.

Sufi swirl as the dust of foot traffic by the fields
As mothers to corn, concentration to ultimate ends
Whispering how the earth lets go of its minerals,
Shakes out its rugs, unfurls, unstitches,
Makes green again the mountain, like rain.
And like the wind’s rain, they turn and dance
With hands just so,
In a gesture of concentration and a question.
A deep movement of the second act,
The band leaning in, the drums booming like thunder.
Turning in on ourselves
As the cave of the sky comes to realize the multiples,
The still births, the trial by error
To meet her lips with calm and sure confidence,
The trembling lips,
The feet still turning the dizzy storm, forlorn.

Alone is the naked one,
At the meeting rivers of the whirlpool,
Both disappearance and emergence
As the moment might bring forth the unexpected.
Sad at the loss of the last.
Turning water in desperate straits,
Forgetting as forgiving and all is lost.
Too tight in concentration to allow the messy other
To scatter all of the pieces without our consent.
She and we will have to wait another day,

And then blood, red running siren of killing,
Animals first, then people as a night of terrible blades
Dividing this from that
As so much skin that can no longer hold its bowl.
Unhinged
We go everywhere, nowhere, nullity, surety,
Synchronous and singular the terrible fates
Of our realization in time and out
As the drowned dog,
The mated fly in its death spiral,
Its purposes mysterious as the low buzz of comrades,
The sharp shots of clapping as the curtain falls.

Next Act

Gun play, dot to dot as a resolution, personal and silent before a legislature of Whigs and Pharisees,
As on a beach the plover darts with quick feet from the surf spread over the bubbling insects
and tiny things – crustaceans in the sand.

The many hands clutch the many kerchiefs and
Dab at tears and snuffle under the breath of wind in the bright sun.
Can there never be a climax?
Hot bugs, flat sand, restless horizons clouded with smoke,
Crowded with families over stacked in dinghies, in oar boats and rafts and
The gas sputters an unburnt fuel black and thick that no one wants to breathe.
No one wants endings of skinned knees and sunburn and hunger –
The gad fly- always talking up the far shore as the answer to the now.

Mewling, dueling now, loading up the animals.
Isn’t there something that you should be doing?
Skinny poet on the run from feeling that she might know better, be better and better off alone.
She might douse her shirt front, place the cloth on the table,
Spread the wrinkles with her broad hand, she might,
She might just come for lunch and stay.

Sweet star rise as evening fans the heat away,
Preparing stores of dew for the morning blooms
Beyond the aviary, still hot and humid from the droppings of the terror bird.
Fields are not about work she might say smiling, pouring milk from a tan clay pitcher
With its own pattern of dashes on the blue cloth of morning.
Get dressed, get ready,
Fallow is the way the good ground comes, the fences fall and
The jail break of nature is complete.

Her trellis of nettles, dimples of Pluto, rock us, talk with me some more,
More out there, mas alla.
Timid flower holds the seed,
Takes the bees between its petals and of males,
No wonder they come and go.
As the ship full of oars men or the flight deck crowded in orange and green,
We are an urgency, a latent disease harmless enough in the natural state,
But here, put on the spot at the front of the stage to explain myself,
Must I say, oblong, harbinger of ill-timed greetings
Barely covering the kilts and skirts of masculine aspiration.
Mescaline inspiration, exhale- two, three, four.
Your comfort just ran out the door.

Chop suey sticks, cambric shirt or plaid, submarine or surface vessel,
Your planet has a wobble,
My plan is diminutive, almost handsome while young.
Old badger, dodgy codger
Laying in tunneled fortifications as if the siege were about having enough grass,
As if open space meant more swimming pools and
Grace were the teeth behind the smile. No gloves required.
It’s a clean business on and presumptively on.

White khaki shorts, spits for tennis, gamble, breakfast, swim for lunch,
For the outer bank with tanks.
Test of our caliber and caliper spread on the artillery map,
The cars, over passes under way.

Ten green lungs with nodules on the slide.
Great bereft guns with rust from the rain.
Sea birds and sunshine and
Her skirts hang blowing from the line.
Yours and mine.
Scared, but we share the whole coast with a spider web of roads and
Tension wires supplying ample power at all times of day.

Meek, dark power her poet says.
Bleeding history and straight back chairs
Scooching up to be close to the spread table.
Leave us a space, the doubters, the dead, the Prince
Not yet in retreat enough to return.

Down deep we know it can be good but this may not be the place.
This face I cup in two palms,
I splash the water on me for a shave.
I look into your doubting, darting, delicate eyes,
The lashes blink and nowhere is it time,
The retreat complete, we pack to go home.

By Rolf Stavig,

August, 2022