The spiral is an ancient number,
A shade of former selves,
Metabolizations of form seeking lowest paths
As water or math in the pull of beauty, simplicity, inevitability.

Reflections on reflection, conscious of itself comprehending,
The glass plate holds itself, before its constituent sands reassert
The dangers of chaos placating the whole open system with entropy,
Classicism in decline,
Summations proven improbable as function masters form.

Just a sliver of moon left silver, above the lawn, the ridge, the far trees,
The early morning that deserted your ideas for travel as just
A doodle and signature of sleep; not you at all
And talk of all others quickly turns back in on itself, alive.

Destruction has its place as the beach turns the sand,
Pulling some worlds out to sea like a Galaxy.
Our galaxy, a place among many,
Spiraling and in control is the tug of space herself and
The invisible lashes that shape our ideas,
A substrate intuited round but pulling inward,
Looking on as the Sufi dancer in motion,
Unbearable in a moving balance, sharp as the inquiry
Falling in the rain as music, notes, gesture, word, sand man, artifice
On the head of a pin’s impulse,
The dendrite of an Angel calling in the dark loneliness
For a lover time looks for
As a river never finding her source
But by the twists and turns of moving on.
Concentrate you spinning dervish.
It all depends on you
And your inward looking reflection of it all spiraling.

Is it coming towards us or moving away?
Around and within, the name so familiar,
Ecstatic, proverbial, moving the lips of a breath,
That drift of a heavy cloud, dark grey
As her eye not quite ready to rain and so
The weight remains within.

A torrent, an undertow, the old family album,
Rostrum for clearing the voice of a generation
Beginning with the caught hulk of here and now.
Ahem,
Amen.

By Rolf Stavig
4/15/2023