Where time began her travels,

Among her peoples, wrapped

In shawls on an ocean,

A raft of music naming the generations

For misfits of gnomes and gashes of genius

Left over from volcanoes in the garden,

The creeper vine, the snake, the beetle

Keeping track of taps and rhythms as

The footfalls over the sway of bridges,

The inward turn of the outward journey.

 

Paint the four directions red and yellow,

Add the fifth as time and

The moment retains a mass of stars, a darkling favorite

Like a baby, eyes wide and smiling.

Give her the smell of fresh pounded grain,

Flour risen in loaves, rows abutting and abounding

Home as she shines perfection,

Glimpses the holy number predicated,

Predicted to break the spell.

 

Antediluvian apocalypse by water of the east

And scented in the child’s age.

The West, up to golden calves and hummocks of the shore sands

Where grasses push up and bend in the salty wind.

In the first sun, alleviated by no burden

In the wind, tracing fragments of faces and disciplines

Relinquished for difficulty,

For trying out the fit of fish to the waters

Beyond the continent’s shelf of perception, of depth,

Of trying another way round, a back gate of the garden

Still swinging from the mystery’s exit.

 

Her template and rhythm,

Sun and some you know while others trail off,

Bent by land lubbers and black grease at the joints and arms

Powered by ethereal steam, at once,

As at morning where what sets meets what rises in you.

Death’s slumber and enlightenment’s hurry to forget and

Her forge is as the pike and poles defenders wielded once at gates grown of stone or

Strapped with leather and iron but still falling down around us.

Our jaded tools and faded prints by which flames fanned and

Dropsy collected her invalids by their purple, aged eyelids.

Such are the dead laid away,

The horse steps once echoed and now the stone and drum are

Heard to reverberate, instigate, cut by slash and strike

Of the insufficiency and superfluity of the endeavor’s base and forked goals.

 

The posts are laid in the grass.

The browsers are like tired library patrons or

Supermarket shoppers sampling,

Tasting, putting things away for later.

And later comes, a scared dog of surrender.

A meat hook of moments hung,

Paintings developed by smudge of time and urge of agency

From the veil and her soft lifting lids and the light,

All but gone,

Abiding as reflections discerned.

 

 

By Rolf Stavig

3/08/2025