To Vanish Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Lucky clouds shroud the moon:
That is what she does with her frenetic weathers,
And cars and cables run well and long
Beneath her,
Through the cities and out between the well-
Open pastures,
And I have been thinking of her some nights,
Thinking over her like the diminutive wildflower
Above tree line on the mountain’s
Nape,
Like a dragon-fly sipping wine- I already know she
Can do no good,
Because she is pushing the handy coffins toward me
In her races by her degrees of braver
And braver men:
But I’ve just been thinking of her and drinking whiskey,
Alone underneath the house of the one armed
Farmer,
And I am not so presumptuous to consider myself
Beautiful anymore,
But I can still remember the way she looked in high school
And Disney World,
Which was so damned good to keep me writing of her
Far into old age,
Smelling her vanished but lucid bouquet
In the salty viaducts of my forever truancy, helping me
To remember as well the ways in which I
Have allowed myself to vanish.