In A Garden Of Unwashed Foxes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

For awhile we can fight
Our own
death as it comes,
stardust in the clouds-

Bones tossed into the night
above the fighter ships:
guests to the stoves-

Aging, our Chinese mothers give
us wine and we write poetry
that we have forgotten:

As our youths, piles of drift wood
In Lake Michigan
look on as forgotten shrift-

And the days go by,
a perfecting maze as encircled as China,

Beatific streets broken,
entwined in a garden of unwashed foxes-

The night shifts its elbows at an impossible
dinner table, smoking cigarettes,
trying to make a business proposition
or to court the afternoon.