Beatific White Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What am I doing placing some words on the
Beatific white again?
Trying to appear before beauty as something
Similar,
A mote of sunlight on a cypress,
Seven ants weighing down a dying bee;
But these things I’ve tried to say slur with the
Inebriation of a certain mind,
Like a child of snow waiting at the bus stop
Down the street from where the lions are caged,
As the mists are unfurling from the grasses,
Putting on their second form;
And all of it is beautiful, yes, beautiful,
But neither fully discovered nor understood.
The sea is beautiful too, but much deeper than
The excited tides of its flesh, pricked by the distant gentleman:
I’ve seen these things, and would like to become their aspect,
To draw down on the pages the lines I am able to remember,
And make love alone in the afternoon atop
The roof of the geometry class, while all my peers
Go on to the greater professions, being led with their blinders
On, but now there is only blindness, earth and sky,
And road kill on the concrete river between the disappearing jungle-
And that is how it must be, and nothing needs to be
Said about it, and I am made lesser for saying so,
And lesser still for failing in brief interludes of free verse.
There is no service in the lonely existence of fateful prose,
The ego’s doggerel, the famous gift of wiser men,
And the young Shakespeares already half asleep in their grottos’
Wombs;
If in failure, you fall further still, stand out like a red thief,
A stuttering performer, a griot who cannot remember the
Stories of his ancestors,
Then it is indefinitely better to say nothing,
But to get up with it all and, silently, remain an aspect
Of the greater poetry left unwritten on the beatific white.