To Lose To Remember Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Vaporized until finally hushed:
The vulpine mouths sated off of so many grapes
And housewife breasts:
And the roads again aquamarine, cooling softly and not
So eager for the hours to come after school:
Or any of this, like adolescent boys held up in bedrooms with
Their best friends,
The way bottle rockets have made their landings on neighbors’
Roofs, never to fly again:
And the alligators down the stoops of the pool underneath
The ivory sheens of his topless sister enjoying the
Comic books and the crenulations of
The pool:
Soon it will all surcease and surrender: these will be the last days
Of high school,
And college will come like a sun shower:
And there will be even prettier things; but they too will disappear,
Leaving us to find some other avenue to romanticize that
We will first have to lose to remember.