Something more in the light and shade,
The green and black of bower and in between times
Of dusk and margin where she loves to wile
And the hours slip peacefully to sleep.

To come full circle, emerging next and full
Only to the wink of light, the play of words,
The so much more of each other,
More suffering, more blight it seems, hot and dry.

A world without ice caps
Steaming without us and a few million years of grass,
A few million dollars deep,
Dollop of sunlight, measures of dew.

Me too, she weeps to the river of gold
Her trinkets glassy in reflections,
Smooth eye of the river pooling,
Looking back with its pull upstream
But forever drawn down as the nature of its course dictates,
The patiently cutting line, ever deeper,
Carrying the stone back through time like a canyon.

Dive deeper she tells her contemplative eye,
Only the sky knows the round shoulder of her wings and what’s possible,
All grown shaggy or sparsely attended as infinity in her spare time,
Round us a dime she handles absently in the pocket
Where such things propagate like an economy of the cargo cult-
Ever multiplying from her unconscious halfhearted manipulation,
Finally mastered by the crowd and given up,
Homeless and empty, shy and beseeching
The question of a thousand million flips-
Not coming up even on heads and tails and thus the advantage she harvests
Of momentum hurtling on
With the uncertainty present in everything
And no one talks now about “ever more”.

We have banks for multiplying and mining the elusive currencies of imagination-
The rough edges, the clasp of her gown or hair braid of gold as the bridge to another world,
Just laid and circulating beneath the waves
Beneath the feeling of emptiness with eternity.
The cross currency circulation of blood and money
On the high seas and in the sempiternal dark of all sub-spaces, not human, unconscious,
Dark with the greater stretch of vegetable existence and rock- tough in persistence.
The crystalline structure of her fine eye for jewels,
The truck loads and hulls full of grain transporting,
Investing in the multitude of mind as a mountain holds a path,
Unknowing, irrelevant and part of lifting up or
Wearing down the range of our desires in question,
The handmade implement left from another,
Beaten as lead or with tin, made brass to shine and impress.
We love and rub each other the wrong way, the long way
As tradition subscribes, we forget,
All feeling for the fingers and The Tour of the Outer Hebrides
Who could sally forth such trials on love and personal sacrifice?
You may be the one,
It might be me,
Honey shrift, gambler, maimed aspiration,
Drafted soldier chained to the oar.
We are all going down as down that great mouth of the sea
Behind the raiment of her vestments.
Simple souls by the fire of the earth’s rock smelted and salted and
Cured of impurities by death and the oblong ingot of numbers.

Crepuscular, God’s blood raining from the clouds
Making up the corpuscles of our red blood, our blue blood below skin, still shimmering.
Shining the veins, tubed, we beasts, we turkeys, turn key of liberation,
Accepting this lot, building times ten for all inheritance, all forgetting preserved
Invaluable metal like bits and barbs of information, trivializing,
Going out and coming back with more.
Beating us senseless with the immensity of it all,
With the language intimately linked
Like air to the wind or beads of the sand to the dunes
And the poet’s moon and the saffron and the ginger,
The smudge of rose water on the temples to cool
And finally to concentrate on what is important.

Growing our love a million dollars an hour, now and forever
Like so many boxcars clunking together when the train stops,
At some distance, like thunder, the sound crushes with wonder, rumbles and
Moves us back to the silence of poverty.
What are we left with?
Empty palms up like ears, like corn in the field rustling,
Like a movement of the people starting to believe in their returns.
Ambidextrous tricksters, jokers, flag lifting, kite flying children and
The fools who sing their song.
Grow now like a heap of money: repopulate!

Reap harvests sown in gracious sunshine of Southern climes and rushing waters
And the ideal gentle woman both Amazon in Power, Greek in proportion,
As all providing earth she must be a Goddess,
But look within
Shy saint of the dust – working so hard with soap and water and sin,
Working so hard to come again to the docks,
Laden with keel belly well below the waterline,
The provider of goods and love and progeny,
The very font of selves and the hunger in every absence.

A day, a week, a month longer, we are strung out as the old phone lines
Pulsing with primitive communications about it all and us sinking
Even as we plan for the ship to rise by disgorging all of its loot,
All of us like ship wrecked mariners on debris in the sea, freezing,
Looking into the salty depths for sharks.
Carry off a neighbor’s leg, a mutton from a cage,
The good dishes and the lists from the lives of the poets,
All to make good fare for the protected ruin or active burn
In each stage of our recalcitrant lives.
When will we grow up and learn?
When the palsy of our desires dresses in the bright colors of the catwalk
And the supply chain and the under all of the overalls is hired out and metered
As a truly watched office of the democracy,
Then the vice of our voting can be cranked down on our fingers and
Around our heads like an iron crown and the wind will blow and this time
The world might end by fire
And respiring in its smoke,
Escaping its gloom
Woman and man or some combination finally free of all nations
But the solitude felt deep in each other as a freedom paid most dearly
By all of our ancestors in time.

Monkey bridge dangling,
Is this the best we can do?
The last of the rain falling,
The crown of iron, hot, heavy, dubious.

By Rolf Stavig
8/26/22