O Seasons Of Fraternity Poem by Robert Rorabeck

And I see the skeletons swimming in the sky,
The fractured heirlooms and a green dresser of scars;
Those which we were born to distill into,
The finer elements and the camaraderie of ivory widgets:
They are circling in a salmon bloom, brushing off
The last tendrils of murder, like a ball of fish
Try to preserve their virginal memories, making a beautiful mistake-
Like a washing machine cleaning a gluttonous storm,
But only seasoning rust and rabid dogs leaping at the
Ball joints swiveling on a point above the earth.
Slowly exhausted they settle like rags on a barren forest
Of rattling sticks, and the crows pick between them,
Cawing like grandmothers lining up at a going out
Of business sale: They call others distempered by the albino
Flume which receded into the whiskered trees,
Like marionettes first tangled in a spilling dog fight and then cut
By a worried mother and discarded as ruined fun;
Here the fortune hunters settle too, and ringless knights,
And weeping widows and maidens who refuse to cut
Their hair; and they are all taking away the portions that
They can find when the sun doesn’t creep and blind across
The batwings of elbows and knees- A crop of prickly corn
Rowed in the husks of a dervish’s plagued army, kernelled in jaws,
Something that leapt upwards across the Nile’s prehistory,
And now like a fraternity of forget-me-nots they weather
The glowing storms as the foundational sands fill in the meaning.