Petrifaction Of An Animal Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Warmed by the goddess in her seat,
Paid for a little while, a juniper goddess to be
Jumping over her candlesticks,

We have both found out how to get
Paid in our little ways,
By stony roads switchbacking,
Happening up to the moon,

I suppose that you don't remember
Your little brother,
But here I am waiting beside you,
A would be pin wheeling bag of
Unmatched fireworks
Pressed again my heart

And feel how empty and dizzying
This mountain becomes should
You decide to climb up it,
I should know as I lived here a
Dozen years
Whilst the artist chiseled me
Into a cenotaph

And told me to remain yet very still
While I could look up the skirts
Of the sea

And now I am a millionaire!
A millionaire, as I go echoing
Down the streets of oblivion,

I have become a tattoo beside the
Cheeks of the mountain as the goddesses
Hold their dresses and demur into
The boudoir recessed into
The forgotten playgrounds laying
Upon the yellowed mountains

And I guess that they have invited you
Into their schools laid into the monumental
Lights of their towns;
But their indentured servants, whom
Having learned to kiss the lips
Of metamorphosis,

Having given me better gifts,
Extenuating footprints up against the
Ever abandoning merry golds,

Slip the banshees of shadows underneath
The hem of the rotunda,
And I am left outstretched, elongated,
Coming to show the
Veins of the plenitude:

There upon the switchbacks, where the
Ghosts of the said lovers tattered like
Paper monuments for
The grottos and estuaries of the ill-believing
Heavens,

Remember, I once held their pageantry
Against my chest before I was taken down,
The well-wishing airplanes evaporating from
Their otherworldly tenements,
As you vanished from the existence of my dreams,

To take up your rudimentary knowledge,
Socializing in the shallows,
Tipping your glass contrary wise
When ever I pretended wholeheartedly,
A summer sacrifice I happily became,
A one-man graveyard in his
Thorned crèche
Utterly beneath the smoking cathedrals,

petrification of an animal crucified in heart spoken make believe.