The Season's Failing Play Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If I should not expose the expressions from this
Wound, how would you come to know that you are in me?
Opening rather, the way down to the street,
In the cool theatre: this is how it begins, for with it I
Should entrance you equally, in Technicolor singing:
How joyfully we should rumble, and my fingers clack the
Notes of you along the splendid ridge down the back
Of your aperture’s dress,
As if an apple’s twig along a picket fence,

And openings upon me as well, show yourself to you,
Grinning from the voluptuous mirror the audience sees you
Mortally in me,
And their butter snacking pauses, as from the focus of the lens,
Are you now multiplied in a Mandala of sad, though infinite
Twins,
Gazing thus in an epiphany through the orchards, the geese
Are flying south so early- they are leaving the reeds where
You washed your ankles, and let the saccharine peaches drip
Upon the insouciantly early tadpoles,
As along your undisclosed borders the young men marched finely
Off to war, at a youthful, steady clip;

Now you look to the corner of the field, where winter is blown
Upon your father’s industrious plough, as I play through the branch upon the audience’s
Head- they are laughing at the tragedy I have come up with,
But neither are they looking away: Thus, behind you, but even you
Can see yourself multiplied with me off the ground:
Moaning, I sing thus for you, as slowly the camera leaves your eyes,
And, following my gaze, as if conducted, recedes into
Magnanimous clouds, and the orchestras bow their strings,
And marvelous children not so far away, run around the jabbering
Flag, a bit around the season’s failing play;
They have not gone to see our show, how I on the mark revealed
You to an evening crowded in an early dusk, for they
Were too young to go, and thus take part in each of us.