Appetite (5)

He thanks them genially, amused,
who thank the coatcheck for responding,
leaning a little more than toward,
and smiling himself because she's smiling
anyway, believing the feet still under him,
resisting the sovereign tug of windfields
and strata, these solid enough, light-letting,
and compelling chaperones.  He'd set
an afternoon aside, (and every symbol let behave,
and every sequence of improvement,
made to seem an averaging,) until star-pulse
eases them all to half-belief, and the decade's
shocks re-graded to the night music, a species
afterward, and more a puzzlement, a bobbing
plethora, let play on that deep float,
and drawn again into the stream of appetite.
— The finer the hand the finer the cries
and sharpenings!  The finer the course of overtures,
or soothings by masseuse, the feel
for glacial certitude, melting away, and then
redrawn, melting away into sea-lanes,
seeding the deeps where living seemed protected
in its errors, seemed arriving in some place,
with homes and warmth and these occasions
of their terror, more guest, he thinks, more hobbying,
finding the heart to work ahead.  Could
he have failed to reacquaint, to fit confederacy,
finding their ways to him 
from twilit links or court-study, listening
to the emptied moon, or now this news
by strataphone, conceiving the mind to serve
an urge to property, the mind at such a loss
and lacking credit, on the margins here, where
the predictable meant shameless, sensing
the frictions now, and now the rub-downs
of becoming, that once for all
gone starboard from the deck-rail, and each
to post his way of saying it, hearing
the sirens whine, behind the haunts
of shared cuisine.

 

© Appetite (2)