Having Forgotten The Taste For Her Living Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They’ve stepped out now, they say to smoke,
The eyes of salient nimbus, excited violins:
Their legs the stretch of granddaddy longlegs
Surveying the pipes: When we were ghosts,
I cradled her ancient Hebrew curls, apoplectic
And stubborn, when we’d fight, though she hadn’t
Yet admitted the problem wasn’t in the figure,
Or my old truck marking ruts on the corner
Of the manicured lawn, with the single cypress
Latchkeyed, drunken and swaying in the
Eventual storms, but because she wanted to be
Rich, or the appearance of that thing:
The values her parents impeded her uneven breasts,
My yellowed studio crawling with ants, and
Blemishes, and down below naked lesbians cooing
In the pool; It was all wrong, so she left for the
Summer for her sister’s wedding, and I grew worse,
Took water coloring at a community college,
Farted and cracked nuts, and sated on uneventful porn;
But that was worse, how her eyes grew to terseness
And perfunctory like a rejection letter by a professor
Too lazy to read, or like a poem which has no sense
Of form, just tap-dancing like the rains on corrugations:
Now they sweat together, and have kosher sex,
Wedded by a rabbi, ate latkes, did the Ashkenazi dance;
Swayed me into the sleep of the purest of goyem,
Laid with a thorn intruded in the small of the back of
The most innocent of mountains, hibernated and the
Insouciance of rivers dammed by industrious otters,
Slapped by spawning trout, speckled quartzite and magnesium:
I was the rime smoothed and hidden by the tumble of
Cataracts, curtained by the seeded ferns, unable
To migrate, or do better, forgetting to spend my money,
Loving foreign women who got lucky at bars,
With no sense of tradition, no tempo, but areolas
I imagine which could circle the sun like greyhounds;
And I have yet to find my weapons, or the copper
Button torn on the run, but the night is cyclical, and
I am catching up with the disembodiment of my iron-
Willed foundling, and once together we
Will compete in the quiet brilliance in the
Red nooks of an unemployed campus, and
We will move and laugh with much ambition
And enjambment,
Having forgotten the taste for the living,
But will remain ever faithful beside the eternal
Graves of falling leaves, and poetesses
And paramours with cheeky scars, and
Epitaphs in stone, we would lie upon
As if lying upon their flesh,
Waiting for the winds to bluster excitedly,
And moan in their wispy element,
Relocating into an estuary received by our
Senses.