Leave Me Behind Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Mailboxes are resting like pegs in
A game,
Their tongues undone or bundled up,
Stolen copper painted red,
And I cant wait to get back home again,
Into your streets, down your rows
Where old friends are jubilantly popping
Up like cherished spikenard in the
Armpits of air-plants;
And there is the little swingset where we
Used to suppose,
While even then I thought of my better muses,
Women who could run on all fours
And never stopped to take a breath or hand out
For lunch,
Who could suckle two to four young against
Their chest all the time keeping at a steady gallop,
Girls who grew taller on rainy days,
And disappeared with the blanketing patina
Of light bulbs of
Drunken carnivals:
I don’t know where exactly those ones have gone,
But they’re the real reason why I’ve come back
To our old stomping grounds-
Not to look you up or to take you out to eat,
But to smell them out again,
Their perfumes like sinful filigree, strung out and
Dragged through the clouds,
Their scents spilling demurely leaving such an
Exotic trail from where they didn’t even think
To leave me behind.