Philosophy much maligned in the competitive nature of ideas,
Held from its purpose by its many purposes.
I am no existentialist, much better to define by negation, whittling
Down to what is, by strong strokes and checks of what it is not.

Sizing down to bare nothing,
On its knees, void above, below
And within the skeins of such long expanses of space and time –
Quiescent but not dead.

“You could say” If no one reads it, in America particularly,
I can say whatever I can imagine to be so and it need not be mine.
The very mime of language apes the facts for us to their purpose.
But what if the purpose is a kind of prayer,
A trusting silence of serenades and nuances, characters
For the stage and songs and music
As the math and engineering of the number.

Make it a big number, showy, splashy and vast,
Suiting though not quite a fit to our dame bride,
Now thirty years on in marriage,
A much neglected way of life.
A kind of unconscious prayer
Left over from the prodding and killing
Done in the 20th century.

A fortune teller by birth,
She travels with the lunch crowd now,
In line with the rest of us.
Stage set for a sparse crowd,
Some spare time with performers performing for each other,
Their wives and kids, planting another hope
To fashion rudders for this ship of us.

No shape of us, what with the amorphous subconscious
And the hormonal rage,
Desperate measures making up some bad time
And some good time that everyone feels owed,
But with a bad conscience, a hot breath,
A Simmering fight with the wife,
Not put to words but ready to boil over.

We broil, turn the meat as toil
And the trucks stand for miles
And the supply chain out to sea,
Each day the rising sun, at night the moon,
Soon to cool, we have so much to pray for
And be thankful as the grass, with so much rain,
Turning its heads of grain in the moist evening,
On the wet day of getting things done,
A kind of prayer and longing and tight rope walking,
Between us and our fall,
Our trash heap and the ocean full of plastic,
Feeding the fish with drag lines and
The bottom miles below the surface.

Who knows the destination, the trajectory
Of efforts in the realm of ancestors, prophecies, progeny and money,
Stacked and calm in the great banks of Southampton, Ulster,
Carolina, Lima and beyond.

Great hulks of our production waiting for port, for the bay,
For the place unloading, for trucks coming with our fancies,
It’s the economy isn’t it, on all of us rolling
Like the water on a slave or the butter on a wound
Or the shelf of the continent tending down toward deeper water,
Making us wait, a little longer for Christmas or Buddha
Or what we misplaced and now want back,
A little longer for the thirst to clear,
Longer for songs to sing, voices, feet to move,
Longer for the railway and the airplane
And the number of us finally ripe and ready to hold.
The globe of our ambivalence shining
With its own prospects realized as dusk or dawn
As now.

By Rolf Stavig

7/09/2023