Venal Attritions Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Venal attritions of an overcast day—
Lonely sounds of a girl going home to her apartment
Next to the blinded sea—
Wanting to touch the gray hair of a goddess behind
Her eyes—
Maybe she is in love with her own mother as
Her own heart burns—
There is a grotto in there, and a little plastic
Alter, a nativity and a pieta
That her father once gave her in her childhood
When he poured a dollar's worth of quarts
Into the machine that looked like
A mouth of a lion and spit out things of wax—now
When she dreams,
There is only a green yard, and a topiary around
The church she never enters—
There is a swing-set in the student ghetto—
And muses she guesses she never loved.