Barren Room Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I shall never feel her body’s
rush
the long slow pain she
has inside her
it is no longer for me
she is now the strange
vegetation
the distant pornography
again the lady on the
street
that goes down the way
without brushing me
she no longer yearns for
my body’s heat
she left the furnace
unlit
naked she goes out of my
house into the snow
to die or find another
she does not care which
only that she is through
with me
before she started
she is the startling ice on the
lake
she is the fog on the
mountains gone before I awake
her heart is ethereal
on another man’s plate
her eyes hiss for him
her body is a heat mirage
for him
when I have gone onto the frost
pasture to follow
her she has gone down to
him and the wind has
covered up for her
leaving me to stagger
lost, orphaned to the
night and the loneliness,
my barren room