From Deeper Waters Still Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These storm clouds caterwaul around me in
Their august monsoon, like jaded debutants wailing
In their pretzeled boudoirs,
Leaving a hallway where the angels descent whispering:
I am five hundred pages into Whitman again,
And the flies are in their house in their vaporous mutations
Accentuating the ache and the bleed,
While my bones juxtapose on the concrete where the
Unmowed greenness is seeping, disobeying borders and
Vows where poisonous butterflies rest lisping,
Tangled in their beautiful gowns, forgotten the grossness
They lost when they flit from the knee-high cocoons,
Forgotten their wormy friends, and that they are still poisonous
Though no more so than a paper cut to me; if eaten,
The death of the presocratic burnished into the furrows of
Ancestry, entire armies lulled blue coated in platoons of
Stabwounded hillsides, bayonets blushing the necks of
Beardless infantry; just boys, and their eyes on her halfway
To a psalm, the suppositions of juvenile daydreams:
And this delighted reason cut short as her eyes flit away,
Thus the rain commences into its dispassionate orchestration,
And little girls cry flung from bicycles with bled knees,
Never to look again at the unjustified strangers who met them there,
Like elegant spiders stepping up the flume of a drinking fountain
In high school: There is no reason for this line, nor the one after,
For my eyes have skipped across entire oceans, and drunken
Far deeper from deeper waters still.