Like A Compass's Signal Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Even catastrophes go to sleep, they go:
This way they go like an exhausted sister from a deflated
Sorority:
She go, and the night becomes a womb as if the space
Inside the pillow beneath your head: She dreams of one slick
Sword golden,
Floating like an investigator, like a party favor:
Like this sharp explorer bursting cannons overhead:
She dreams, she dreams of all the vanished swing sets,
Of all the sweet thrilling sweetish things she wished I’d
Said,
But I’ve never said: and pinball games and cabarets and all of
Our children putting softly to bed up in their bedrooms
In their upstairs canopies,
While her golden sword floats through that fog of space and she
Tries to remember and not to remember
All of those lonesome days of lumberjacks and hunting boys
Of footballs games and smoke signals
Like thrilling ghosts over the mowed lawns and estuaries of all of
That immobilized space;
And of the flowers I’d bought her she can’t remember or she
Won’t: Now there are orchards and orchards of heavenly flowers speaking
Like opening presents on Sundays underneath that vessel
Like a compass’ signal pointing to her throat.