Appetite (12)

Believe the rats dance with.  Believe
the drainage schemes.  And the feelings say
of deliberate commotion, tossing
them down or off or back, of child or bride
or evening mystery, and these,
more real to him because of all the distances,
speaking to him and thinking of him
as his survivors, of him as years apart,
as curlicues of ash a woman blows
from her blue wardrobe, raising her glass
to each, her eyes to all of them.  But
what's a man to say, seeing the legs she's crossed
or now the motions of ascending,
hastening an evening's dark, if he would choose
to stray, for every dimple quickening,
or figure the meal complete, for all the go-ahead
of it, and every frank event, sketched
as the conversations fall, and the smalltalk
drawn upon a misremembered sentence?
Believing the sea-stalks weave.  Believing
reception lines or the furnace of sea-change.
Believing the seasons come to more
than crash-study and flash-cards.  And what of the deadwood
blown along the sea-shock boulevards,
the decade's prospering ruin, the magic broken
from him and fetching their accounting?
And what of their worn selves, wearing an evening's
bright or blues another time, remembering
the eyes of children losing children as they weather,
or, rubbing their own sides once, exciting
themselves to seem so splendid and so caught?
Patrons swagger back to him.  Strangers
settle in, as proofs or something once, voices
affirming their own news with straight shots or champale,
blowing their smoke to shield themselves
from shrugs and argument, and letting him
out of it for once, who dreamed abundance
through hard times, who figures the curves
or sorts the fingered racks of magazines,
time enough at last, who motions himself
among the village brides and oddities,
imagining the physics and pure arms, the thunder
itself hardbound, and prattling
briefs of purchases.

 

© Robert Lietz