Robert Lietz

Breaking In

Filling a page when he might just as well
have filled a page, he likes the raw materials
the ammonia-haunted bowls, expressions the old men shared
among the riggings and the fiscs,
susceptible to prompts, to the motions just behind
the layings-on and arrogance. Verve deepens
in the templates, in the course of vegetables, in every
leisure to know, leaving the closed shops caught
and the keen edge of argument, fingers clearing out
the cache, spilling the ghostly fruit, the ghosts
already gone into the lull on entering, deepening
the whispers in old port and in the dream-souffles.
He’ll let the barn-mice jig, he thinks, wearing
the scraps of festival, perked and erudite, subverting
the swaggers afterward, the children worrying
their lives, and every awkward emphasis, having
these ermine, egg-white, scarlet points
to get across, and doubling the detachment
when their good fun’s done.

Robert Lietz © 2009

Ocean Audience (2)

  Should you import such images, alerted by sines
and contraband, by natural restrictions,

  leathers digging in, finding the sun above the house,
the scythe-blade dulled and slopes

  made dangerous, the shadows indoors restored,
what would there be to do

  except to see lives graduate, adopt their readiness
to grip, except, as one absorbed, and one

  with them, to seem as one within the script, and with
the light let fall behind the cardinal draperies,

  happy as meals were, as uninventoried light
deciding on a subject? And here,

  among the spellbound-still accoutrements, left-overs
concentrate, in love and motion still,

  and their phenomenally touched selves, seeing
their lawns to snuff or pouring off their own,

  in rooms where lives conceived becoming something
  once,
in pillared rooms and sleeplessness

  and dreadful circulation, warped frames
and needle-stitch, their scythes

  made dull for every pass through the sandgrasses,
and love’s morphologies, and the kempt lawns

  turned by the beach-skies to hyperscripts. Why
wouldn’t you cheer with them such nights

  when home-squads dominate, seeing them cheered
themselves, or handing their bodies off

  in lexial harmonics, thrilled by the first
good tune, by the cacoons

  and plastics scratching frost-hewn stones, mothers
coming to be, there on the eve of everything,

  and children, evolved dimensionally, gliding
among the cloud-drifts and the painted trees,

  over the front lawns taking time and personalized?
So much for the decades practicing.

  So much for the hall doors, the varnished
and adult mystery, deepening

  weekend dreams, deepening the hobbies woven,
the skeletal awkwardness

  and household interests, for living old
and off, hearing the tall grass sob,

  seasonally drawn and stretched, and seeing
the wheat hued light assume

  a steeper influence, following the scores
and story-lines and satellite attentions,

  the pre-venting scripts, centripetal gradients
and chills, caculated back to stasis

  and to outlet benefits.

Robert Lietz © 2009