In Its Apathetic Shade Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Nights of storyless jubilee-
The soldiers truncated in the cemetery,
Nothing about them sparse,
Just a little warm- balmy- their petticoat
Flowers are melting,
And full of garden snakes:
And there are no mountains, no muses;
At least she doesn’t
Call- The soldiers are full of broken wax-
They are weather-destroyed books I think
I should not sell-
I try to look through the dour indigo of that
Massive tree,
But the sorority is dark behind it, and turned
off; she has her
More eloquent men who wouldn’t
Be caught dead here:
Men who like cartoons with no interruptions;
And I am in the dog house again,
Without children, just the tiny scabs of fickle
Wounds:
And I doubt she cares to know that I want nothing
More than to sniff her ankle,
To bow in her shade and curl my tail for awhile-
To whine in suppliant mastery.
She probably thinks I’m sick.
She doesn’t think of me at all; and that’s good:
She’s moved out of here like a carnival turned off
And packed up, telescoped into a saddled centipede
Rhapsodies of daydreams
Sashaying with a hundred cadmium legs down that
Faded hall;
And the highway she goes is high and leaping,
And I think it should never come down.
I am in its apathetic shade, feverish and weeping.