The Gift Of Love By One Such As You Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I have tried calling for you for so long,
The pain has become a common courtesy
Around which both you and your lover should attend,
Dance and walk down into and behold the ushering walls
That have caved in upon me: Point thinks out,
Nuzzle and curl under his arm and stretch,
See those things you would have found beautiful,
And let my fever fall down upon you like the pulsing
Thorn in a star: See how in the least I have
Succeeded, if you didn’t even know, or you
Don’t read it anymore, that I still write for you
Laid out upon a sheetless mattress, post-modern Prometheus in a tomb at
High altitude; I pick wildflowers by the roots,
And thrust them still choking out for you like suffocating fish.
I once took an aspen bough in autumn and drove it
To your town, meaning to leave it on your doorstep,
But I only fell asleep at my friend’s house, when he
Said I shouldn’t meander, so I didn’t go to you to see
You serving drinks to your many painless lovers. Now in
The dark again, I try to arrange myself by your romance,
And wonder if you have scars on your body in the same
Places I have scars, and if you know I have one tattoo from Spain, a little
Dagger now blurred like a cellist on a darkened stoop.
He plays all night for the cats, and when he lays down his
Bow it just as well may be suicide, for the Roman forts
Are like white scars on the cliffs, and the windmills are
Turning their heads like gawking choruses spinning their
Arms, winnowing the wind’s muses; and if I should
Not brush against you ever,
Know that I have already changed uncountable times,
In my attempts to be near you; and I am forgetting who I am,
Or that I ever carried that notion to know myself through the
Gift of love by one such as you.