Transparencies and Fields

Robert Lietz

How they'd depended once on bodies getting done!
And how they had looked outside, beside

the homes they'd raised despite convictions over borders,
where you could hang most anything,

where love for sure, and love, for its calypso variants,
defying the grumbles overhead, took up

with sentiment and selves, implementing anything. And
now these stones alive

imagine fidelites of scale, the voices of stones alive, above
the weaving river grasses, unable

to control or fathom still, believe the change of light
had meant the village powered down

/the scruffs had chased down innocents/seeing the trucks
waved through, and then the sudden blasts

where worlds widely spun, arranging the face
in permafrost, and, after twenty years,

absurd!, and after twenty years, impossible!-- this heft
where dreams could stand to be considered,

this dust and air and light, this wishbone light/these
cross-lit constancies, persisting on the wharves,

and on the blocks made bright by the persisting acappellas,
leaving the night alone, and leaving

these rock-forms gazing off the hills and naming planets,
happy to have heard jazz-rounds

and, thinking, after all, themselves this etiquette, these song
and gutter -birds, here in the flashing light

that seems to move on the glad waters, this scaled say
and reflexive calculus, reaching about so far,

for all the terrible concentration, for all the sad misanthropies
and personal subscriptions, to

reappreciate the tunes, the moods when fronts
moved duly through the country,

the music tracking from the fish shacks
on Commercial Boulevard.

The 2River View, 2_1 (Fall 1997)