But A Poetic Lie Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I try to ink these lines. See that I do,
So you will not turn away, and the sun is the promise
You never gave sinking. But you,
How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
And I travel by myself in the park looking up at the empty libraries, weeping:
I have gathered grinding stones around me to build a cairn,
To pinnacle the summit where you could tell me of traditions
Forever, taciturn folklores set in books of strangers,
and we would never sleep but watch the
Whisky Migrations of homeless men traveling beneath the cuckolded overpass:
Each one goes towards, and then away, stripped of all societies,
They are imitating the sea beneath us, and off to the east;
They are but the feral cadences left off of war and dead children
Drowned in the Somme and the Psalms.
Standing right beside you, I fly toward you, things which cannot be escaped
but how does it happen
That you should not see me staunchly decked:
An officer and if not a gentlemen, a wolf making room for your
Scarlet tallow;
If perceived, I would be a knight and you could send me out
From your boudoir’s loci of honeymoons for three
Things you wanted the most, and such trinkets, I would bring them back to you.
But on the third night, be warned: I would deceive you even as you listened
To the cars rushing outside the silken lace whispering upon your comely window.
I would come to you like a charm, removing your girdle,
And lay those projects upon your weeping openness which I had found or
Made for you, not matter the price;
and with my fingers let you know how to wear them;
But the third thing would be the parts of my own blossoming
drizzled upon you, confection’s foreplays, soon knocked and entering: See by this now,
The gentle line the rains transcend, the storm into the glimmering streets:
I’ve walked where the alligators smile, and smelled you in the fields of sugarcane.
Now do not tarry for what is coming in the east, a strange eclipse captured
But once, a somnambulating photograph, and if seen again will be but a poetic lie.