Hunting For Your Elusive Love Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How can I give you more of this ever failing verse?
I pick a line for you, it withers before it reaches your lips.
If I do not pick something beautiful enough,
You grow inattentive,
And give your heart to brave soldiers.
So I travel up the lighted stairs to the attic
Where the grandfather lives with his little girl.
They know everything about the mountains,
And they can sing:
I bottle their romance in an empty medicine bottle.
The label is torn off,
And you can use it for a vase;
It is easily big enough for all the things that I say,
To puncture your heart with an arrow head
I stole from my mother,
And that gives me time to look for new phrases
That grow where the dead men lay tongue-tied
In the ravishing gardens:
As you pause,
Because it is dangerous, the games we young men play,
And at anytime you can return to your queen:
In the forms of water and wood,
Just one suckle from the breast of that muse,
The lady only the published can tackle,
And you will never again turn your head to this page,
So I must open up these wrists
And search for the novel species of a diviner kingdom,
Leaping through the canals and estuaries,
For phrasings of thought I have to discover,
To butter your lips, and butcher your heart,
Because your are the kind my wanting needs,
And no other, though I may live alone
In the valleys of unrestive attentions unto old age,
I will remain for you the cartographer of perfumes,
The trapper of far away gazes,
Hunting for your elusive love.