Working Territories
by Robert Lietz

You look in the mirror and find this pick-up
riding hard, and, off to the left,
in elderwood, a lone owl welcoming
the grey light over him,
satisfied to sit, to pass on this careless glint,
this scrap of inflecting stuff,
risking in cold-dried stalks the coldest
of cold comforts. It's adding
to sprinkles, less. It's adding to talk, talk, talk,
measuring Beauty's loss,
and Beauty's turn-about -- and only
the weather holding back -- concluding
in village noise, evening on the house, suppers
with wine, without desserts. So much
for the owl and faces behind you and ahead,
this moonlight arranged in limbs
and laid out on pond waters -- for fifty years,
you think, marked in these tracks
burned in or logged in as expenses, in mornings
the traffic all wants by, piecing
this grey so bright it might seem personal.
It's only a sprinkle, less. It's only
this Pittsburgh say, this Cleveland midnight
in the works, this surplus anything,
issues of imports and strict speeds, and only
these singers now -- since
you have felt the need for them -- only
this wind, this oxygen, this moon
on the drinks of choice, this boy with his first calf,
first auction cash and complicating thunder,
but only a sprinkle, less, and less of himself
in love or any other climate.
Even the chaos dressed for it. And the winds
screamed down off Alabama Avenue,
leaving this hammered look, this almost masonic light
in supperhour brighteners -- seamless,
innocent -- dressing the decks in Baton Rouge
or Sugar Creek. You pass on the weasel
photographs, pas son the cruder manuals, tonight
as the news tauts bullet-proof, tauts
dreams so bright they might seem personal,
if only to ask you what's become,
what you had dressed for once, but the owl-light
after all, this pulsing or chalked-off company,
keeping track of the expense, playing its own
sweet will over the sweet ivories
and capsizings, putting the darkness back,
and the darkness altogether in a jif.

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