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| by Paula Lietz |
The
Understanding
What if there'd been no railroad / radio -- and
would not -- for a long time -- be -- no tarmac
maybe / or strip-mine a half-mile walk uphill
through thorn-tangles -- where
the capguns cracked -- and crabapple arsenals
taught bad kids what kids could --
what would the same words seem -- played down
to scarcely measureable proportions -- or
the children seem -- who would grow
up -- afterward
and well -- and leave us ( I suppose )
what wishing now -- as easily ruled / ruled out --
as easily lost maybe -- as block-dances were
and summer socials -- as old occasions were --
for public music and odd costumes -- when
the disgust itself / the village-wide fatigue assumed
the stairs and wreaths and
ribbons /
the scripts
and instruction manuals -- and the square
itself --
where
one lopped thing stands -- the acres where set flames
or dozers feed themselves -- on skeletal trees and stumps --
where once they shaded families? Even
the mind clears out -- after twenty say / thirty years
remembering. And grandeur the cruel outdoors
exaggerates / plays down -- to say what a poplar
meant -- or groomings made the planet -- this
poplar say -- dropped headlong into skinned water -- but
greening / greening still -- after the cousins / aunts
/ after the uncles say
and the oldest
spooks dance
their unwindings -- while wilder and scarier dozens
doze and flame and redevelop -- since spectacle
must count -- since leather must count -- and
mission pine -- initials reminiscent of hill causes --
since all they had said of pleasure then
or of awaiting -- of avoiding monasteries -- overbooked
with penitents or outlaws in disguises -- must
( after all ) seem belliesful -- when we have asked
what gives / examined the last cliches
and the old name-plates -- having practiced we thought
to speak the names and origins
and
textures --
which must have mattered once -- when the
wines
( varietal ) -- and the goat cheeses
/ the stone roads -- reminiscent of the tastings
and lawn-bowling -- left us
the wonder and the understanding
nature of.
Robert Lietz has over 700 poems in more than one hundred
journals in the U.S. and Canada, in Sweden and U.K, including Agni Review, Antioch Review, Carolina
Quarterly, Epoch, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review,
The North American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Seven collections of poems
have been published, including Running in
Place (L’Epervier Press,). At Park
and East Division ( L’Epervier Press,) The
Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press,) and Storm Service (Basfal Books). Basfal also published After Business in the West: New and Selected
Poems.
