The Tide's Au'Vior Poem by Robert Rorabeck

A viper bit me in the throat,
He said he love me but he don’t. Now
Here so close to the ground the sky is twirling,
Twirling mad around; and birds, who are little girls
Up to their knees, preening in the crooks of sad,
Sad trees;
And I don’t know anymore about what I’ve done;
My entire family is out of state and on the lamb- When we
Used to sell so many things, produce to living souls and
Tourists as naked as bed sheets billowing under the sun:
Every day, I suppose, every day until now used
To lead up to a girl, as a mailman to the door. How many
Countless times I’ve watched her smile, like an afternoon
Of game shows just in lingerie, dripping smoke and oil;
But ‘taint no more, that’s for sure- She gone and flip’n
Metamorphosed into a heron, long and leggy, and in the marsh
She born a baby, an infant of a crocodile, so teal and lanky
And feral smiled;
And now he trills and bites her bosom, just a diadem I am sure,
Just a sparkling hallucination drooling in the tide’s au’voir-
There is the last thing the sun proclaims on, the bosom upon
Which he casts his rays on- Then blushing like a mailman,
Or a dusky raconteur, he shuts the door behind him and whistling like a
Day-gone fireman leaves her until tomorrow, and the shadows fill
With my sorrow, but the waves proceed to touch her,
For their shadows tend to rush her: just her, her child, and her letters,
Going into the deeper, more rooted fetters,
So all night long in her dreams moaning premonitions, her jaw unhinges
Like a music box to the lunar conditions, and she sways with a
Somnambulist’s insouciant precision; or at least this is how I think to
Find her, lying out beneath her weather, just a boy in heath and heather;
Or like a gardener with his sprinkler would like to find his flower
Garden and so to tend her, watering her with his spigot, and handling
His trough, and digging her with it; but she has already sent the
Pigeons each strapped with her penultimate conditions,
That she has stopped thinking of me; in fact her thoughts have utterly
Transcended, and to have ever considered she’s resented;
But how the pigeons are lazy messengers, and I feed them cheese
And crackers, just so that they will fail to mention that I am weeping
There beneath her window, listening to her scribble innuendos,
To more fine and frisky fellows, boys who live in grand old castles
Instead of weeping there on her very floor;
But come sunlight I’ll have won her, and tease, and squeeze and
Fun her, because I’ll have donned all the lucent wonder she could
Have never much imagined it before:
But it’s true that the child, yet so tailed, toothy, and so wild,
I will make him meek and mild, and she will love me sure.