Hoping To Appear Mysterious Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I was on the mountain where there
Were tourists, and it snowed for the first time
That season, just as it snowed for my birthday;
And looking down,
I could truly say that I saw the whole thing,
Those villages in the nooks and crannies
Where citizens cried and made love,
And dogs ran in slightly feral wonders to and
From the bakers and the butchers,
Amazed and distracted by the dinner-time smells.
I could only sit there for a few minutes,
For down at sea level there were things to do
Waiting for me, and even greater than these was the
Continuation of what now amounted to over
Five years of insouciant limbo truncated in a
Celibate bedroom; slightly scarred, I departed
Justly separated from the others of my kind,
Thinking of sweet little accolades and comparing the
Aspens to segregated sororities swaying the deep southern
Continents where oral folklore still existed;
There was a video game which needed beating,
And a halfway cohesive poem to write, a little
Bit of yard work, and then to record the footprints
In the valleys which meandered from turquoise arrowhead
To ochre; and looking up, after I had come down,
There she was, the constant goddess shackled to the
Earth, as airplanes leapt over her head like silver frogs
On their way to Alaska, or Honolulu, and some of those
Travelers had their faces in totem-poles, and others
Made thousands writing romance novels;
But they could not say who I was. If they looked down
They couldn’t even see me, but I did not blame them,
For I had already turned away, and disappeared into the
Tule fog, hoping to appear mysterious.