The Golden Webs Of His Sister's Paramour Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am going into a new red bricked valley
Where I must promise not to look at myself
Too many times in what nimbus underbelly
There might be,
Or the indigo of leaking guts of blocked school-
Buses,
Look at me hiding out through lunch, my students
They fine and skipping,
Or playing basketball next to where the pummeled
Alligators are correlating;
And if I see two distant figures crossing the
Funneled corrugations, leaving school and all
Sanctioned nations, coroneted by sea-gulls late to
Brunch,
And the palm trees swaying like planted pompadours,
I must realize that it is my far deformed youth I am seeing,
That casual boy who looks nothing like me,
Who never loved me; and I should sit and pray and wonder
How far a field he is going, those two jubilating boys
Like unchallenged shadows going, to smoke and swing
And not think too much on the backyard patio where the
Clear pool is crenellating, the golden webs of his
Sister’s paramour.

For, in fact, there is nothing I can
Teach him- The cops have already lost him and
his parents can not imagine where he is,
As they industriously stock the shelves of their
Insignificant entrepreneurial store; but
Now I see him, a thought laughing on the roof,
A punk-rock conquistador slowly receding while the clouds
Ascend him- The sun is sinking- they are still burning
Sugar-cane in the west, passing over so many canals of
Citrus-tumbled drainage. Beautiful midgets ride upon the
Smooth tops of soft-shelled turtles,
Passing languidly and cross-legged under quite peaceful
Bridges; mermaids and commuters line up for
Gas; soon too the students will be deposited once more like
Rivers back into the romance of their domestic valleys,
The slender plots of green and rooms legal
And sanctioned for them to explore;
Finally he will find his own way home and the curtains will cloth
Him, and the audience will first clap and stand and go away
And forget all about him, and he will not be seen once more-
It will be like we never were, as I lay thus napping
Dreaming of a youthful brother who of, in truth, I am no longer sure.