Fastly Fading Noons Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am drained by people,
And the subtleties their eyes can put upon a body,
The small business adventures they go on,
When the sky is open to them like a freshly eaten shell.
I am aware of the traffic on all these streets,
Like concrete tributaries to the greater good-bye;
If you spend so many years with schoolmates
Only to watch them latch on to their new work,
Forgetting the casual love that must have pricked them eventually;
I can go back to those neighborhoods in a sober
Calming rain, and walk those avenues yet fully grown,
And I will not recognize a single person,
Though the landscaping is the same beautiful resilience
Of thatching green and budding red, the storm makes
Fertile and quivering;
I can go to the park where I skipped school, the dream
Of the somber girl still waiting for me on the swings;
But she is not there- the desire is a ghostly place,
And she is far away in a brilliant new suite smartly defending
Her client, earning her way, loving a male of her new
Socio economic privilege;
Slowly, the houses grow weary of the parade of families,
And their facades dull, their gutters weep and dribble in
The cold, salty storm;
And I can lie there for all my time, in the corner of a world
No longer belonging to anyone,
Watch a caterpillar disappear into a cocoon to come out something
New, but not me; As the river speaks and floods,
I go down the avenues of friends I don’t know anymore;
All that I lost too soon, as if I were some unstable bystander
Who needed to step away.
There where they are singing in the softly glowing church,
Where I kissed her mouth and felt her leg in between the play’s
Rehearsals. The next week she was with someone else,
And I no longer snuck out of her window to watch the world
Smolder beneath the fastly fading noons.