Huddling In Septembers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There are places I still believe in
Where I never met you
Huddling in Septembers
Near the sea,
Where I walk past your window
Every evening and never see you
Though your curtains are drawn
And you are sitting at the
Dinner table, holding hands with
Your family,
Praying,

And though I walk past you
Time and time again,
It is always the same night
For the moon is hung and
The stars, like ornaments
Decorating your neighborhood,
The way they did for us,
Now the blue whispers
Resting in graveyards of
Rooms we once occupied
Now occupied by others

The night I was with you on
The walk, where I still walk alone,
Your night lies
Further
In the necessities of carrying-on
Where I am the thing best
Forgotten in the seas
Of many nights passing,

Where I now walk,
Looking forwards,
I can never see you
Through your window,
Though you are always
Occupied there
As you set your table
Carefully under the lights

You are singing to yourself
And are warm inside

I am outside


And the green lawns
And the newly washed cars
The tiny stone walkways
Curling beneath cypress,
And through it all the quiet
Sounds a neighborhood
Makes when it is contented

All this
Decorates your new mind
And everything here serves as
Pillows on which
You rest

Where I walk now you
Never go, and your eyes never linger,
Though I am always right there
Walking by you, looking in-
Every evening is the same evening,
And all the evenings huddling in
Septembers,

When once we walked together by
Your house and held hands and
Swung in the park. Where we had
Tremendous dreams of children
And publications
Here you never go
Alone. You bring your husband and
Your children, and when you go this
Is now your park,
Your green space in which you grow,
And I am to you like a thing thrown
Deliberately out to sea,
Washed away from your memory

So I am left walking alone
In front of your house, every night
Looking for you through your window,
But never seeing you,
My footsteps moving backwards,
Year after year,
Remembering you as you
Step forward

Leaving me
huddling
In Septembers.