Death's Table Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The eye ducts of God,
Heartbroken,
Send floods down from the peaks
Of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains
In spring, the sun’s shadow
Resurrecting in steep fields
The schizophrenic colors of Van Gough’s palette—
In somber expressionisms spill over
The quartzite cliffs, like the ruin
Of stone viaducts stolen by the Romans
From Ancient Greece—
Like silver faucets her eyes crawl upwards
As if spindle-legged water spiders along
The anemic channels from the Orient
Veined in rivers of amethyst
Bled, my opened wrists
Perfuming the bathtub with anachronistic murder
Framed in the open window through which
The world barks like a sick dog.
Breathless feeling now wears crawling bracelets
Of six legged flies that eat death
To dim and clean the fires, checking in
Along the porcelain shores of his clotting
Cadmium pool in twilight
Glints of our smothered son;
It is how Jupiter must observe
Loosely robed by her courting moons,
Like Queen Elizabeth keeping crowned,
She stands out on her dark terrace
At the end of our life—
There she sets Death’s table to dine….