The Changeless Show Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If today was yesterday, was a year, a decade:
Zeno would still be sitting in the kitchen,
Sharing lightweight conversation with your mother:
The laundry would still be churning like
A Cyborg’s hungry stomach,
And indefinitely you would be the same,
The same, as the presocratic philosophers would tell you
Crowding your living room, watching daytime soap operas:
Their words would make a hutch out of
Your skull, a domesticated nervousness,
A clone of your inner child opening your
Presents on Christmas Morning,
Caressing your father’s beard and smelling his
Potent flatulence:
All the same- the large house in the cypress
Down the road from the zoo is still there,
And the prehistoric alligator is in the very same canal.
The lions’ mating roars cupped in the porcelain
Ears of the Naiad in the torpid green;
She still goes unseen and maidenly through the briny slow:
The gated communities with their stuffed heads,
The tubby lawyers on the back nine with their daytime broads:
You see it all, and you’ve seen it all before-
Every year more and more of the changeless show:
You want to love her, and she wants to love you,
The girl in kindergarten whose lips changed
Into butterfly wings, and the sun into a ripe pineapple,
The girl you never knew, you will never know,
The buxom ingénue of the after school bus ride home:
The last look of a decade ago, and then the changeless distance.
The uncertainty of the fixation of her adolescent iris-
Even if all the clocks committed suicide, it would not change.