Her Backyard's Memory Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How sadly the pictures hang from their quiet song,
And I keep looking at them out of the apartment
I don’t live in anymore;
I might be there holding her hand, but the graveyard
Is out of frame,
And she has let go of my grasp and wedded a man
I have never met, but he has met her tongue
And her body laid down at night, which I had met before,
But those photographs she has kept of us
Mean the things which are in the coy twitters
Of her backyard’s memory, bricked up inside the
Mouth of a dismissed tree, with her childhood
She doesn’t play with anymore; in the waning lights
Out of reach, shredded for a nest of carnivorous bluebirds:
They look pretty, and we matched,
And we used to smile at each other and sometimes peck,
Until the red tide swept away the heirlooms of
The leased spaces, like a waitress who has left her job
To flumes of the flooded and encroaching sea; She admits that there was
Once a beautiful if sparse hemisphere in the cheap stuccos
Of undergraduate demention, but I don’t ever believe
She saw the communal pool as I still do, drooling from
The steps of my worn spine: the haunting estuaries of silent
Bodies of water unoccupied except for the sway of
Artificial light, and my eyes like yet hypnotized
Moths metamorphosed and dancing to the undulating patterns,
like amorphous leopard seals of celibate drifts,
Remaining there in the luxury of decades as strangers walk
Through the shadows, unreadable books in their fleeting grasp.