That Was Valentines Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They have this, and this is real:
As real as the concrete rivers that the cars drive- while,
Words are not real,
Even placed at their fingertips they are ghosts:
And she has beauty, but so does the cut flower, and everyone
Knows how swift they can change:
The way grandfathers nod and die in an apiary even while
Their youngsters are busily singing-
Making that fine melody out of their trumpets- storefronts
In their combs,
And all the world caracoling around them, like a great Ferris
Wheel who has found its home,
No longer wishing for migration nor metamorphosis-
And who will see her then, her children marbleized,
Her parents something out of a funeral:
The world trumpeting, but the elephants in it evaporated:
The fans who once showered her with the fortuitous captivations
Of symmetry, gone down
To their hallucinatory easements- and the school of her adulations
Abandoned:
All the gaudy clothing raped off the Bosque- who will float
Down to her then to lick her withering armpits like kines to
Saltlick- and give her the ephemeral beauty
Of jigsaw stones such as this: and yet I am here, remembering,
Cleaved by the cutlass of my young bones-
Wanting to live with her for eighty years and forever-
Heartbroken, crying for more of her young leftovers,
Even though we made love three days ago, and that was Valentines.