Appetite (1)

No sound from the play deck.  Not a flatland
winter sunset anywhere, transforming
the shocked straight, the stillness bloodsped
and revalued as survival, relieved
in matched accounts, in one's brush-layerings,
one's multiple exposures, the forms
of figuring hugely drawn and drawn away
on the sea's crest:  leaving
to him his temperance; and to him these streets
where brothers stumble into slug-fests,
slow-motion finally, treated to what and if
and showing the bodies off,
and the bodies now in a unanimous accounting.
— The winters will burn on the sea-lanes,
and burn at home in lives bragging venison,
until a man declines, resisting history,
and men in uniform deck rails, the enclosures
of pure speaking waiting ahead for them,
sketched as careers or sportsmanship, as moving out
for good.  He sets the magazine to rest,
and feels the grove snow sift into the spread
of every sentence, and now the fierce
diagonals, cutting across the bare, burnt rise
of open country, bringing the likes of these
to bear, Nelliston, Little Falls, Palatine Bridge,
Ft. Plain, a people alone too long,
crowded in ranks too long, and needing the space
for their refreshment, finding their ease
in charcoal and in pastel prints, in skills addressed
as beverage sharpens appetite, in humors
conceived as tincturings, or in applause for one
who's opened a house to their amusement,
feeling himself, as spirits seek, reach tip to base,
seeking again for their keen figures, even
as these appear to him, who had been waving
to the lifeboats, and after the lifeboats
then, as every odyssey broke form. 

© Robert Lietz