Hunting And Gathering Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Weren’t there poets before there were words,
Cause didn’t they need love in the boreal eras of moose and rime-
My brothers, the grandfathers of her eyes of sad prehistory;
When her shoulders are naked opal on the stereoscopic hills:
Expressing themselves with bitter howls to
The throbbing night,
And in the flickering stalactites of fanged caverns,
Dripping with the minerals of torpid architecture,
As in the wombs of the earth, and the animals without names
Roaming, the men without names:
They can smell her joints through her skin, and her needs.
Wasn’t there love then all of the truth,
The magnetic directions without slabs of death:
The concrete tombs we go into work now:
And the occupations which give us the speech of our employers,
The busy blue cars buzz from each infected wound.
And didn’t our antediluvian lovers know better of love,
Wordless, speechless hunting for the vocabularies
Nothing more than mist from her sought lips:
The need to survive,
Her thighs skipping across stones on the high banks:
An icicle drips, she cries naked like a blue lion in the trees,
As the clouds swathe the highest points of the earth like mourners:
Wanting them, wanting something from her peripheral vision:
The heavenly crux of his stonebuilder hands cupping her,
Unwashed, untrimmed;
The poetry in the body like scraping flint,
The discovery of fire: the ecstatic truth of the leather tramps;
Now: all of this,
And the attempts the blue collared scribes make to
Scratch it out: This is not love. This is not rhyme.
The city moves, but doesn’t breathe, the lines do not lead to water.
This is not poetry, and there is not a poet left alive
Who doesn’t live in the cages of feral wolves, snarling his proofs,
Though we fools swirl the wine down our throats,
And call the doggerel of cadavers good:
Where they found her then could never be spoken,
But the quiet sentinels horned and pined swayed unreasonably:
That was the only time there was poetry:
Poetry is forgotten.... Poetry is living above the mountains,
And beneath the seas: Poetry has fled to the moon Unspoken: Now,
Only arithmetic of uneven sums,
The tin halos of politicians who worship no one but steady whores;
The men with cap guns, the plastic conquistadors.
Come down from this; it isn’t real. This is the last quarter in the machine.
Afterwards, it will go still.
It will stop entertaining us with whizzing predictions.
Then my love will find us muted in our time, and she will press
Our love to us from her love,
As flowers are kept in between the pages of lonely authors,
And there will be nothing to be said;
And there will be everything shouted from her gaze.
We will not say a word. We will return to her shelter,
And to the throbbing chambers,
The poetry we will reclaim,
We will neither hear nor speak.