Turn round, no tricks but time
And that but knots in a rope or a pulley downstream,
Across the tracks for the water wheel still shedding splinters,
Grey wood, diaspora, river.

Porous ground, waiting like deep snow accumulating.
What am I tangled up in, really – The Upanishads, my father’s friends
And the time before the show, a little nervous,
A bit on point for resolutions or waffling.
If it adds up, it adds like the water and the land and the weather
As things in cycle, forward moving, traceable to the past and
Mr. Joyce and Mr. Eliot 101 years on now
And the scramble has settled to eggs
And the circle has given up its praises
And left us to question our devotions, ambitions, fate.

Not to be never to be, but being closely nestled in the mind,
My mind, sleepy, fed, ready for bed but
We are going out.
It is raining.
We are going out.
Perfect Sundays; bored, restless, wondering.
Bridges, passage dried, wetted, dried again,
The mind in its seasons, eclipses, dependency on all others
And their subtle clues, their indications of advantage or alliance,
Availability, sympathy in word and deed, ears,
The ones headed home, the crowded tram,
Nietzsche going to the aid of a beaten horse.
Sense for the danger in opportunity, in travel,
In being such a distance from home, but in our own heads.
Each her own,
Curved inward as a family might turn her outward in long appeal of souls
For an answer hibernating deep in front room customs, habits of denial.

Austerity is different from desiccation.
Some other mountain to climb,
Like age dressed in bed clothes dreaming of the next and better.

Joyce and Eliot wouldn’t have gotten along very well.
In Paris maybe for a few days or distant from each other in study thinking,
But the banker, the Irishman, all the travelers, what do I know?
Death undone for a crowd of welcome,
Celebration in the streets of Denver.
Ham and eggs, Kensington,
The river Liffey and her eggs in the grass.
Left out long, we might be more like the animals
And our growls and bedding, pups and love on the ground
As in the air – the life’s work of birds is a habit in the air,
Ducks pushing to the far shore,
The moment still eludes
As it is born and becomes as the rest,
A pattern in the long grass left by wakened deer, still wet,
The deer alert as the train windows flash by
With destinations of day dreams
And the floating home of anxiousness in an age,
A place no longer protected
But by this insatiable web of verbiage, algae thick green
And matted that is everyone and their culture suffocating
As if a billion people on one brown river could sustain
The billion more just down stream waking
In the busy humming jar of another city,
Not on a hill or in a valley –
But a city of ten million none the less,
Busy putting on together
As their kids plod off in London in the rain
With the taste and smell of traffic
And the sustaining order of suburbs with certain limits.

Fumes, front gardens –
Little brick walls with places for bins and mail,
Subscriptions and bills.

By Rolf Stavig