Appetite (11)

Nights, then nights.  Acquiring tastes
for the poached fish.  Waiting for troops
come home to boot the flagging tax-spread.
They nurture the tolerance then need,
amused as girls by the cuts of the chefs' beards,
and by these piquancies, sharpening
pride and diligence, accustoming themselves
to all the pitch of surfaces,
the gossip steeping among seemly bachelorettes.
And so they bring themselves to him,
give their faces up to him, to sheaths
of contract illustrations,
delivering to him their wide-planed gaze,
corrected by pine-thrusts.  And so
a man might page himself, inventing bistro,
beergarden, and plaza atmospheres,
recipes to match the rooms they crowd at compass points,
recovering the words men lost,
following league play into service, and, couples
another time, the words reviving
homebodies for night-life, stepping from dullness
dog-lathered curbs into mid-century.
— Or so he thinks to page himself.  Or feels
the limits there, behind all acts
of seeing first.  So they let themselves be drawn,
down steps to curbs, drawn and redone,
voices from the bridge, and voices going down
for good, these undeliverables,
borne, or ordered away, or breaking spells,
location itself redone as whim and sympathy.
I page myself, he might have said,
accompany that patois and sharpening hunger
to the side booths, a perishable sea-bright clue,
and, not a shred himself, and, not the nerve
for their theatrics, called upon to look, to visit
their griefs, relieve hurt silhouettes, pairs
smoothing out themselves, finding in bobbing ice
sea-lights and now retreats to dinner menus,
bringing there  and here to bear, and being here,
like some hallucination in low lighting,
requiring assembly, requiring these factored
recipes, these accompanying neat
or doctored gulp-me-downs.

 

© Robert Lietz