The Eternal Negative Of The Most Beautiful Mountains Poem by Robert Rorabeck

For an hour,
In love with the subtle rain- and then a prognosis:
There is a rose clinging to the
Gentle face of the gingerbread house:
It doesn't move,
Butterflies come and make love:
This is the only place that the humans and insects
Will ever know-

The officials hurry by and arrest the delinquents:
They were kicking out all of the lights of the beautiful neighborhoods,
And now my sister has progressed:

She is make more money than I ever will,
Or, at least she thinks she does:

After the storm,
My wife takes the children outside:
It is late into the afternoon- I am tired from looking at emptied
Baseball diamonds posted by boys who will
Always be better looking than me:

I take a picture of myself and the Grand Canyon:
The eternal negative of the most beautiful mountain,
And then we go to sleep thinking of trolls:

Above our beds, the face of the heavens storms-
And lucky boys get rich before they fade away:
They die;
After riding all of the roller coasters of their graduations,
And after making love to all of the multitudes of girls:

They settle down towards the séances of their graves-
And in their cemeteries of splendor they are able to sell for awhile,
Still composing after the multitudes of their deaths-

And I am fortunate enough to remember these things about them,
Because, angrily, my wife has taken the children outside for a walk,
Besides the busied cars and beneath of the hurried airplanes,
She has gone off for awhile to breathe-

And the beautiful boys curled up into the rucksacks of the cul-de-sacs
Of their neighborhoods, and, having closed their eyes,
Can remember the Barbie dolls of their earliest, nascent neighborhoods:

And the beautiful teachers that each of us once knew have curled up
Underneath the bridges, their toes being eaten by the most innocent of minnows,
Having been eagerly defeated by the trolls hotly stemmed from the control
Groups of their cannibalistic societies:

It is over for them and so they slumber, troubledly:
But you seem to yet hold over: an imperfect vision, such as if blurs of stained
Glass:
For a moment, passingly beautiful: a drunken pilot may have noticed you,
Before you matriculate to the stately agricultures
Which hemmed you in and made you what you are:

But now the finer features of your skeleton are vacated to the glaucomas
Of the night- petrifying birds all of nocturnal features that are blooding their beaks upon
Your glass,
Trying to invade your bedroom:

There you are, a slumbering doll, tossed
About into your upstairs somnambulations: I remember when you told
Me that my poems could have been beautiful,

But now the tears of the rainstorms are wrecking your bedrooms,
Holding over the green stems,
Pretending to break their necks-
And I am waiting for my wife and children to return home,
So that I might remember how to turn myself in,
To crawl into a bed of my own
And turn off all the lights.