Folded inward so long
As to finally find a way out to others
As if communicating through veils of time
That landed us here.

We two, semblance, reflection,
Doting and doubting that
Ever two worlds could say and be
Free, good.

Efficacy and morality
As if a human person were built on pillars
Rather than pride and loathing,
High and low, in and out
Of the dualities trapping the language of the mind
As if fits and starts were the animal way that led
To us, animals all
In patient project of mutual fabrication.

Blowing up and confounding end times and origins,
Whispers, shouts, whiskers of the cat fish,
Antenna of the cars
Circling the black race track of our circling.
You who were me, are me yonder
Like the fence posts, the voltage wires
Sliding past on their poles at speed.
Our necks at waiver, holding the head so thinly,
So vulnerable to the lower traumas of the body,
The times, the politics.
Ground up to a fine powder,
Sifted, mixed with meal
And double crossers of land and air
Like a cloud and a lake conversing
With circular symmetries dropped,
Expanding in the deep they are to become.

Little rain drops one and all
Dimpling the geologic record as bones turned
To ashen finery, laced up like the boots of time
On the march of fire and ice, rice and gruel
Trailing the tears that dwell still
In our hearts from first inhabitants still lamenting
What we all do with the land
Like our bodies, our poor and meagre selves,
Our litmus of danger and place of retreat.

Entirely derivative, common place,
Spooling from the talk chord of a thousand umbilicals
And the bibles and retrospective prospect,
The lake is a little deeper than we imagined.
The times chafe with its shore,
Winking like a sphincter of each little wave
Giving out and drawing back.

Each life, each word
As blades of the endless plains
Waving of butchery and feeding our families.
Raw corn snow,
Late light of faded days
Diffracted in glasses of the water tables
Calculated out to reveal us in all our number,
Both shy and bold as the city
Shielding fleshy inhabitants
At pulse with the aquifer,
The deep well pulling up cold
Beneath the sand
As our plumbing relents
And we are agog
With the choked dog of it all
And all its washing
Hung on the line in
The sun to dry.

By Rolf Stavig
7-16-2023