In My Lonely Bachelordom Of A Pinball Game Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pitiless contributories aglow in the hearths of
Collegiate mountains:
I have been drinking rum, Sharon, but tonight you might
As well be my muse: Do you yet read these awful dalliances,
These rubs of antique genies,
Or these rope tricks to no where: I’ll have a house now
Sharon- by the end of this birth month, I will be all alone in
A yellow fort older than your grandmother,
Owned by a Norwegian artist of eggs for twenty years before me;
But now it is mine, Sharon, and in its humid nights I might as
Well think of you,
Because you were an artist and maybe a friend, and maybe
I fought to control myself across the classroom for you: Sharon;
And maybe this is all wrong: and maybe you were meant to be shoeless
And lost in the same forest as me, Sharon; if you are reading these,
My consumptive and sickly blue butterfly: That is who you
Are, like a candle that burns without oxygen, your daughter
Needing another sip of your name: maybe your husband is all wrong,
Or maybe this is just another quarter in my lonely bachelordom
Of a pinball game.