In the Canyons

Tangled and tangential,

Too real to be pretty,

Too much of the past leaning into the future.

Dumb bells to lift.

Blue bells in a field of grass.

The train goes by. People wave.

We are working out in the yard,

Doing sets and curls,

Still in our pajamas

Like Andrew Wyeth and the girl in the grass,

But later in Spring now,

The brown grass already sprouted,

Blooming, almost laying in like an abundance of hay

And fever.

All is not well.

The farm house dry as clap board on the plain,

The barn leaning slightly in.

If not for the birds time might seem to go on

Forever and we don’t want that.

When the time comes to die

Let it be so.

The ocean knows how it feels

In its tide to be pulled like a vast river

By the dry blood moon with its ice sunken poles,

Caught always with its face toward earth.

Its pock marked craters behind, around,

Endless as death, turning spoke of the Milky Way’s wheel,

The way of all things greatly outweighed,

Out worked by emptiness and persistence.

It may be pretentious and presumptuous to call it love,

Especially when we know in tatters what people typically mean.

But this is not the same case

Somehow on the way home we lost someone,

Maybe a child in a snowstorm, a terrible blizzard of the blowing snow,

Drifting high as a wall by a sleeping alcoholic

Who is true and innocent and warm, now.

Verge of frozen tears,

Lake of fire,

Who is gathering corn in the hectic somnolent sleep of eternal patience,

Numbing extent and behind the dams of grief

Turning schools of fish reflect from brilliant scales and sun

That such cold water released from the bottom of the dam

Warms slightly as it starts to move over the sandstones and shards

Of granite standing or at rest in the canyons.

By Rolf Stavig

4/11/2026

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

In the Canyons

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