Robert Lietz - Poem

     Were the nights worth bothering, words dressed
in the crisp air and belated literatures?
He thinks of plasmas braced for an affront or interlude,
and of the subjects once,
matters run to form, and form to mischief
or to stately disarray,
the looks of surfaces, crazed by levelling,
and of these skip-scuffed spheres
and cupboard seasonings, lifting the drawn sun to it,
to his own pink flesh weighing out the sport,
weighing the stints and terrible lingo of the body,
so much as living in the skin
     had left to it.

     Airborne, he thinks, astute, astir among the foothills
and the bandage mists:  aviators say,
coveting old sport, assume their natures then,
sort place to sums and exponential digits,
to these kids dressed up for their more common perishing.
And so he measures out the ounce,
considers the whims condensed by times, the ounce
and organic recompense, night
cut to quick or cut to prospering, condensed by time
to lively stories for the matchcovers
-- playing the clues to lot, considering the twists
by which good water fell to them,
the properties derived, welcoming the mongrel’s whine
and odder hush from the casinos, where once
the language had such skin, where the deserted twins
amused themselves among the hand-toys,
weighing themselves in time, in the snaps of mind
and means to get across, leaving
the star-sheaves flaring, where
they burned their dead
     for heat.
                        (From Spooking in the Ruins)