Fast And Fleeted Heart Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Because I haven’t caught her yet,
I’m casting out again letting this silver net
Of lies free to sink and entangle about her
Pinkish knees, where she rests wading
Upon the briny knolls reading books to selkies-
The women who come up half amused
To stare when in the daylight they have lungs,
And lips to smooch, and mollusk tongues,
And appetites to preach from sea up to sun.
There as if imagined by Botticelli, with
Eyes of cousins they stare for awhile amidst
Those interpretive eddies which fasten to rocks
When the tide exhales, they learn of the
Others’ declivities, and how the souls unfasten
When they sleep and swim around
Murmuring their subconscious dreams and shopping,
And I become but an interrupting wave of
Masculine instinct breaking once upon them
And then away, back again into all the others
Bemoaning their loneliness and playing sports
In the brief enraptures of entangled brethrens,
The nets I threw nothing more than a spider’s
Spume, a roaring chorus on the shoals, which lapped
Her knees with scrawling drool, the unbanished
Light quickly scrubbed away, and took the memory too
Of the finite wave I was, leaving my mark well
Below the bosom of her fast and fleeted heart.