Stratifying The Old Masters Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The male and female skeletons are not identical-
They both smile, but they have little difference:
They don’t listen to answering machines,
Their natural abundance is with earthworms swimmingly
Kept lined in the grass like unimposing teams,
Kept distilled like pioneers hemmed in by the barbaric
Earth: Yes, defeated, but not given up- Whole towers
Of dead over spilling sometimes into the banks of
Over-greedy rivers- This horizontal cavalcade distilled
OF their flowers of evil, their pugnacious needs,
Their thirsts to abbreviate their territory, to manhandle
Their thirst- They are more identical this way than they
Are now, driving to their cars, looking for show.
Somehow more distinguished with less on,
Unaffected by the lights off the evenings glow of the television.
They still don’t go out to much, or sit down to read the news.
They don’t listen to the lions roaring nocturnally somewhere
Escaped around the over-weedy cul-de-sacs of the old
Neighborhood- But in an inanimate nation they set up
Their parliament, their arts unto them, their monoliths most
Contentedly unobstructed by the dazed old masters; and now
This- Supposing it has found them out, they will be pacifist
To the delineation of their natures- Man and wife alike now,
Sexes hard to distinguish, ripe and pale along a beach of polished stones,
Fishwives who don’t care any longer how much sturgeon goes unsold.