No landscape lasts forever,
As much a truism of geology as the model of human repetition,
Faces and more loaned at birth from what went before
As variations on our theme.

Our wet dream of touching structure, theory, template and substrate
Where numbers always match their ideal.
The cards turn from the deck.
The money flows and sometimes breakfast is on the house, drinks too,
Keep coming like the streams carving a channel,
Picking from the banks the small stones they can carry.

I thought to bring a few words along like a sandwich on a hike.
Talk is cheap even when you mean what you say,
As with the limitations of the dictionary and models in so many tongues,
The thin air at altitude, said before in so many words.
The mine shaft and the naughty bits like salt or paprika to taste.

She loves a brown ale,
Salty snacks at cocktail hour and the slot machines and green table
And the stage, full of musicians and crew.
Cue the sun indeed, in all the hotel rooms,
Real as the tongue twister of any drama bold enough to say so,
Trailing away at the delta,
The sand spread as hair on a pillow or
Channels in the muddy home of mandrake and hurricane
And the changes wrought on our genome
With our meeting and tumult in the hotel sheets
And the balcony and the room service,
Burgers with French Fries.
We can spend some more,
Our time worth as much as our attention,
Barely aware that now is always chasing away,
Not quite the same as sand in the salt flats or
Waves of a rising sea, face off to a red Range Rover or
Back in the alley where hypodermics live and
The bundle of mammalian nerve ganglia are
As the bright lights, like a cop shining us up
For some obscenity of law and the established wisdom.

By Rolf Stavig
7/7/2024