Appetite (13)

Inflections haunt.  And any sandy place
becomes an inland mimicry, a reflex yielding
to broadview, breezing away in fly-buzzed

scarcely clinging fringe.  He might retire
into it, meaning to accelerate, hold on, and letting
an image tantalize, the susurrance/montage,

the cordial, elevated tellings, the trumpet
lists, made kinder by survivors.  Pebbles
riffle the pond glow.  And thundering feasts

of narrative take research to its source,
ineligibilities cross-referenced beneath uncloudy skies,
under the blue and brooding starklands

of creation.  Sheaths might be another way
of telling it.  And somebody's been told,
leaving all kinds of men to wonder at sea-needs,

walking for blocks where rain had dropped
and dried for hours, as if they must have missed
some point, as if there were more to green,

to light-gathering chrome, to low, streetwise
and deep recuperations:  Than accent
and address, than outlaw thrusts, this breath

by which a block reports as innocent.
Or now this walk through these and other densities,
through crowd-space, bearing the water

freshly drawn, feeling his way to prints,
from caricatures, through layering designs, following
the problematic reach of atoms

under bedcovers.  Sketches haunt his hand
to fits, and character, visited as deepening
late extravagance, completes or complements,

a vision in waves and images, naive, naif,
an opening of doors or wings or shaken currencies,
and these, riding a hunch, gliding the spines

of dolphins or straddling lead death, a hunch 
that meant highways and other kinds of prospering,
and now these forms gone guzzling

from Buffalo downstate, a people, pinched
by the exotic and by nightschooling,
seeking their homes in strange

outlandish increments.

 

© Robert Lietz