Bland and bad ass at the same time.
Bored, redolent as kindling ready to catch spark and
Swap the Kingfisher for the Nightingale,
The ground for the air.

See the turtle baby working on his shell and
Liberation is a tall and salty tale,
Tender as the new sprig or the bob cat’s little behind.

A pig splash and pigeon’s glimmer,
Tell alls and alibies that vie for supremacy and
The right, the angle, the obtuse observation of caged things,
Spaghettified from true selves to the morph of cells nearly inanimate
To thought, more like senses,
Unpresumptive but communicative,
Saying things like high and low,
Hot and cold.

Sweet and sour,
The bowl and the flour to dip the pork and dumplings and
The blueberry turnovers for desert with a little cream, a sprig,
A fascination the chemical make up of taste and smell.
We are junior partners to the dogs,
Eye blind to the hawks watching from above and
Even the crows have three toes and never speak directly of evil.
Truisms of justice, wit or benevolence may have served courts and poets in the past
But now such qualities are drained of meaning by reasonable interpretive machinery.
Minds I mean, have found another course for their water,
Less illustrious but still wet.

Such is the magic of two plus four to the crowd of six and
The suspension of disbelief, if only for a moment,
Alive to our inner possibility.
Capacity building they call it.
Deep respect for personal autonomy,
Wrinkles in the convolutions of complexity,
The Sulcus and the brain’s hemispheres and
The base of skull with its port to the spinal cord.
The limbic system, smell and the sun on your face and
Food in your bowl.

Time alone
As an agent reflective of the past,
Internal is this version of the world,
Not ideal but suspended between there and here
As a moment, a date, a time that we spend together.
What a good dog.
What fair shake do we expect in the rain,
With a change of plan,
The season cutting off whole populations,
Now afoot, migratory like constellations,
The others in our field of view, in our fields
Bent with a splash of color, weavings,
Head gear.

By Rolf Stavig
3/23/25