Forbearance Of Her Memory Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Getting up is getting easier now that I know
Who I am:
A poet of some possibility, as the sun shies through
The leafy arcade,
A man of no account, a drifter of the hills:
I know myself better than most: I lie, I cheat,
I steal, but I am a good man, as the whippoorwill
Trills around the freshly painted roof, like a red festival
Above where no one lives:
And there are better men than me, those who pronounce
Themselves to a room, those who have something to say
With the verbosity of so many planets,
But when they are done proclaiming their accolades,
There is first echoes and then only silence, and that is
Where I stand out, a better silhouette, someone
Who lives in instances of lucid memory, loving the reflections
A wishing well gives in the brightest noontime,
With the bodies walking above it rippling, the dislocated
Fish in the experiment of my eyes: the women
I dream about swimming above me,
Not stopping to throw in their loose change;
They are better without me, and gone to the loud men,
They leave me alone now breathing in the shallow water
As clear as a single note plucked on a harp upon the breast
Of a powdery virgin in the flaxen glade of her woods:
She sings to me throughout my days, as the meadows dance,
And it is no longer painful to listen to her voice,
For I have wanted her for so long, and now I remember her
Sleeping on the school bus, just a little tramp grown up
Near the waterwheels which drooled like silk my ancestors
Spun from wooden thoraxes, the juvenile cataracts rushing like
Kittens; My grandfather saw her eyes once in a dream he
Gave to me, and now I awake gladdened, assured that my
Love once looked deep into the eyes of my forbearance,
Before dancing away like the long trail of a wedding gown,
Like the effluvious ribbons of a stream which has gone
So far, and has yet so far to go.