The False Lights Done Burning Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Speak plainly in the emptiness of
A cathedral;
It is beautiful singing where there are
Rats, making scatter over the
Broken murals
Of a dilapidated religion; so many
Unrequited failings,
As there are burned rafters
Where she once made love to her piano
As if she was some woman coming directly
From a French movie,
Composing after paintings of my grandfather;
Some woman, also, who fed her cannibalistic
Brood up on the gurgling shoals of
The venomous grotto, shedding oily scales,
As I did tears;
The kerosene lamp burning along with the
Sulfurous fireworks;
Pale against the rummy tattoos of her besmudged fathers.
Founder of a school of thought where her
Student, skeletons, laughed like mute jackals;
Was she capable of loving, pantomiming with
The shadows in the cave where they
Butchered sharks;
But she kept on coughing laughter with them,
And it was the last darkness coming up over
The sea she existed in,
But by the time I interested her, the horrible music
Was no polytonal desperation, but
A gesture in a crowd of gestures misinterpreted
With the rats.
The sea felt sick from too much salty confection.
The sky was butchered and she lay asleep, a
Strumpet with her men, all of them in shadow against a wall
Where the sharks hung the false lights done burning.