Dialogue with the plants, with the plains and the mountains
Listening in with spells of uplift and morning and rain.
Overture that on the trail the neon forfeits and
Blast furnace smelters, that smeared the causeway with sheen,
Are yet timorous as servants, not savants of humanity’s orthodoxy.

Doxa, practice, ways of thinking to exceed the reach by naming mana
Of a new gain, an inward trial by the compass of feeling,
Tuning the teeth of the ethical wheel to turn its sprocket
Just to glimpse the light within a holy family,
Living in the ignorance of poverty.

If only the more we would have were the hold of the grain ship
Filled with wheat or white with rice or ice or building supplies and
Stoves against unpredictable weather.
Even better, towers from which to say in us and to us
That here it comes, the transformation of means
By which the infrastructure, like a copious language turned to truth
Starts to live in the kitchen where said family plans.

Votes to let the grass grow and no votes at all
But the need for hour after hour,
Subsumed and sublime in the occupation of the every day.
Portentous of dream and dreary dark rearing up idealism
Like the flame that burns of the others and their ideas,
Their equality and need for lethargy,
As the fuel the young burn to travel.
Don’t be afraid of the hot stage, the smug mummer dressed in fur,
Shaggy and rangy as dogs packed from a city of wolves and heaves and
Cats in a smiley alley of cans lit backstage, strapped to scaffold,
Brick workers and flight engineers telling the tide of history
That the next wave is recession, receding contemplation,
Bourgeois and temperate as parents at the local school.

No grass fire, no hinterland of slave hints or jute flutes
But fluttering notes do rise,
The tinkle of pipes and buildings and laundry left hanging
From the building, blowing in the gentle
As a flag washed of all its colors,
Like the equalizer of soot and fertilizer
On the fields of the Thracian sun as the games begin and
The city of gold looses its memory to the day.

An old, still song keeps moving on
Steady as the tracks, the drums, the travesty in a maelstrom of making,
In the intricate carving of the new soul’s baroque interior
Filled with curlicues of infinity,
Galaxies saying so and

Rendering the plasma of synchronous atoms,
The ballast of the cargo cult come to humanity’s shore
From the refinement of the inner eye and her ability
To perceive and build beauty.

By Rolf Stavig 1/15/23