Not rolling the dice, not being shy to say so.
A bloom is a soon to come tune like a mountain
From which it comes.
The land washes this way,
The uncertainty of the tumble, the grist,
Determination to persevere with language.
To line up pad and ink and sleep
The way it has always changed
From present to opportune.

Cosmos of the four symbols,
One for each direction,
The blessed one laid in the middle – expectant.

Take us by the hands,
Kindling the little fires,
The breakaway and the sinking.
Bright sun says so.
Amber shadow of night
In the air of our world sounding out
Something prismatic for the ear.
Impossible for bird song or fire cracker or ragged edge
Binding one fabric to another and
Blowing with the terrible wind,
Terrible again.

Terrible the poverty, the doubt, the war.
Terrible the peace, the faith and the surety of righteousness.
Of never knowing where we stand with each other,
Kneel with each other, lay and recite with one another.
The story of what took place, shaping us so violently,
Indiscriminately, wading into it.

The maw, the mower of more souls
And never souls but stars
Out where Dante dreamed above and Milton below.
Little Milton and the generations of the cannon, London,
The father’s time, the lost time, between the wars.
The surest thing, bound, contained,
As the mineral in the rock,
The layers of sand pressing into stone
A mile below the surfaces of earth,
The faces of the Anthropocene.
No landscape lasts forever,
All things come to ends.

Terrible the sit, the certainty, the feeling of it,
Loving you with nowhere to grow.
To glow, to go, hurry up please…
The time I borrowed your cloistered Eliot,
Your liberated Tukaram on the road,
The songs of the faithful washing the feet like a beach.
It’s a sad state of affairs she said to me,
Reaching out with a touch of the lavender ague.
Regret, resignation, hopes in face of stark beauty,
Truth of never and always as drinks pour,
The wheels turn,
The empires have their rise and fall.

You tempted Whitman in love and
Ended gay war.
You listed Sophocles on the book spine and title jacket,
Wrapped up Seneca and the Romans, listed,
Enlisted so many as if the shore were this one,
The one you came for alone
And together, only at funerals reading your verses
Or to sanctify the Army at day break on the field or
In the night clubs huddled with a few friends,
Each wanting to have her turn,
This moment brave,
Like the others to come and gone.
A family if you will, shaggy, coarse or
Shaved up and shined for the disagreements buried,
The prospects selfish as pride.

The tin cup sins and shadow hearts of the land
Lurking in a twilight surf of aphids and flies
Catching light or in the furrows a more constant suffering
Of land turned over, mud flats, distance walked, broken down,
Sandburg’s Chicago, Whitman’s New York, Dylan forgetting Minnesota
For the Village, Berkely, California.
The playa of Nevada is parched chalk
Until the big rain turns all the tracks to mud.
The bad water crossing and towns
At the crossing of railroad and freeway, agriculture and pesticides
Green as the swaying field, the shuddering train
Trying to brake in time,
Before the glass crumbles, steel and plastic
Makes itself a folding accordion, just like it is supposed to,
To save us from ourselves.

My own bloated self is my fear
Like the stagnant pool of the overused irrigation ditch,
Full of plastic, green, yellow as gas.
The days are numbered,
The mind not that strong.
The fates of the faith are wayward.
I cease to believe in anything and
That is a serious and distasteful downfall.
Not what Emily and Walt would say,
Looking out over the farm land of America.
We are broken like wire,
Fooled by hijinks and proud – too proud in
Maintaining a hilarious loneliness in a crowd.

Who quits believing in earth and children and the substratum
Like rhizomes of history run through every leaf and every tree –
Down to us, to the subtle electricity of the mind following
As a stream its flowing water,
Its racing sky of consecutive days and nights,
Not to mention clouds and the hiding and uncovering of the moon.
Who could possibly, ever be sure?

Sun glasses and the hilt of the knife
Stopping the ceremonial plunge of the blade into the chest,
Like a barrel of dirt or rain water.
We mix up our mud pies with butter and flour and insects.
We buzz as Egyptians who once steadied the Valley of Kings against robbers,
Now only surviving by the cunning thieves and the floods that bury all in time
And in time recover still the tokens, the marks, the strata
Like pages of the books that brought our minds to this unusual
Unfolding of offspring.
This now said and by the next word nudged.

Concatenation,
The trail of how one thought, one word follows from another,
Like people, mother and child or
The chain gang pushed from the plank or out the door of the rushing box car,
The train of a thousand cars, black as coal,
Hauling death like the night, forever still
As truly a greatness beyond.

Take no solace from the vast if you see the smudge marks of our smallness,
The smoke of our lives dissembling up and out into the air,
Not a cloud, not a river, not a word remaining.
Set your teeth against the hunger.
Fathom as far in Winter as you dare to go,
Thinking things through to ends, as marshy as the origins,
The original of the lowlands wet with tea color and
Tincture of the leaves, the rot, the nests and homes of the buried dead
On top, or maybe more in the middle of still buried and varied vastnesses.
Names of the wind, empty as space,
Culled to wait in the barest extremes of being.

The leachings of the land,
The tri color long since shredded,
Bleached, balanced out by a new passion for someone.
Someone voluptuous, of the level, predictive of high seas
And the will to be patient.

So much is required,
Emptying our very notion of self
To make room, to make play
At believing again in the old way.
Older than that, whatever it is you may be thinking,
More simple, more evident
And still alive.

By Rolf Stavig 11/12/2023