Down In The Valley Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The horses are sick again,
Leaning over the blue meadow in an
Uneasy way;
I follow their rut, my nose stuck
In Chaucer at the part where he died,
And gave a justly permanent cessation
To the poetry,
As if there’d been a car crash in
Merry Old England,
But even then the sun was the same sun,
But a little younger, and the continents
Have yawned a breath or two more,
And there are new aqueducts,
And its easier to be nameless and not
Pressed into feudal wars, if only by a little.
Language has grown corrupted,
While science profound, the seas are
Beginning to taste her salty ankles,
The butchers make their sombulent rounds:
And she is in the dewy eye of an insect’s
Arrhythmical heart, the years,
The years, the years, she goes beating,
Just as the horses’ hoofs trample around the
Ovals making room for the weathers,
But eventually in aberrations concluded,
Even while she is like confection in angora,
She too will be the ancient husk lowered
By the pulleys of strange men, but they will
Still read of her, high upon the newer aqueducts,
Biting their lip at the personifications of a resurrection,
The illuminating filament ironically in the dullest
Print, for I have placed her there for the years,
Like a beautiful flower distilled between
The pages of a book.