Appetite (8)

How long might one stay lucky in that field?
Or march, used miserably, concluding
his field songs in reedy scintillance, as if the mold
a troop took on should not account,
a people stepping to him from pastel and from
bolder rows, like sea-walkers dreams fit,
and passing from him to sealed living-rooms, alive
in case with cross-currencies and interest —
but nothing much to tell, a people shaken and re-set,
leaving the splendid plates to him, the pieces
of wall-eye, crumbs of dinner rolls, the proofs
of smoke, and moonlight now, heard rasping
in low branches:  He brings them round himself,
in lines and shade, an attending glide
or pressure brought to bear, and 10 years afterward,
revising that plain exactitude, the vintner, say,
arguing principles and source-points, the figures
pawing husks or nothing among husks,
or this one freshening with lavender, chemise
— He suffers it all not to complain,
distributes the cargoes now, the shames and discipline,
tempted from streets as much to forget
as entertain, recalling the genial if weathered skirts
of mendicants, the looks of carolers
treading scales, working their ways toward him
through an abstracting dissonance, apprenticing
themselves to forms, and to interior lines of form,
and entering his fatigue, his speculative sleep,
extorting valuables, accounting their privacies
for him and marginal tristesse, summoned,
maybe, cramping the dining and club space
as if they willed to dispossess.

 

© Appetite (2)