Robert Lietz: PATCHES from Variable Cycles • Cleaver Magazine

Robert Lietz
PATCHES: from Variable Cycles

……What would a God expect, anticipate. And what,
besides endurance or equation, what, besides sentence,
metaphor, should God, wearing a first name
and welcoming cheered brothers, make of an occasion
and address, of conditions say, the debris
of sentiment, a God, three marveling equal parts, while
we, memorably at home, embrace in ourselves
the need for understanding, another April out of doors,
to see how these geese persist, below the leafless
short limbs the geese will soon abandon, huddling, until
green’s fulfilled, and the robins, believing something’s
up, shriek from, fly off, from the ivy where they’re nesting,
shaken, we think, by two below, by the chiminea glow
and porch tunes, or by this sense of something up, besides
the first good week of spring, as if it were always, only
a matter of sense, of mutual, incontrovertible affirming,
to taste on the tongue, spun wildly, the pitch
and pillow talk of the Creation, to find, in warmth-raised
fogs, the blue and bright to clear off morning cautions,
positioning the phrase and signature, with gratitude
to bear, and a word, beyond all words amazement’s
ever meant, like some cross-species correcting
and delight, or these patches, say, we think
must keep the barns up through
…….hard seasons.

Robert Lietz’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Agni, Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Eight collections have been published, including Running in Place, At Park and East Division, The Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) Storm Service, and After Business in the West (Basal Books.) His poems have appeared in several webzines. Additionally, he spends a good deal of time taking, post-processing, and printing photographs, examining the relationship between the image-making and the poems he is exploring.