The Names Of Other Lovers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You’ll go this way, and we’ll make love:
We’ll sleep over alone together- the rivers will
Flow around the empty rooms in
Houses,
And the eagles will birth their young over the highest
Canopies in the forest:
Their first born will be as blonde as a forest fire,
And in her freckled armpits he’ll find shade,
As if in a fire escape or
An apple orchard:
He will learn how to stand up and breathe at a rest
Stop going up to her university
Oily and tanned, never learning a better language,
The airplanes traveling as if on
A scent overhead, the pinwheels and roller coasters
Curling in the peppermint hallucinations
Too sweet for the tourists to avoid-
And if there were any better words, or prayers to
Sing to her- and if there is a better girl than
Her to sing to,
He, of course will never know- because she will be
As far as he can learn,
And even all of his nights will be spent auburn, nude,
And wounded beneath her windows,
As she cries down to him the names of other loves,
In languages he is too far from her to understand.