In The Sepias Of Regardless Holidays Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When I am young, I drive up early to take look
At your face; And I do not drink, but sailors
Tell me your stare hits like rum, and how you sway
Makes the teak of ships well embarrassed,
And even immaculate carpenters a bit leery: These men who
You don’t see greet me before morning and lead
Me to you singing salty sea shanties- I suppose
This has happened before,
Just like the lolling of dogs who like to bury,
and now I am just boastfully reminiscing;
And that you were my girlfriend, and now I have
Nothing else to do but to swear and drink and play
Atari; but I greeted you there in your first sorority,
Well gowned for that portion of the upper-
Middle class colony,
The blue jays of fables primarily chirping,
Before the sun was bright with chores,
And the eggs were cracked and running,
Before they were beaten into cakes for birthdays, and you
Had to apologize, because you couldn’t let me in,
Because it was too near the beginning, especially with the
Standard-bred men’s choir singing,
The wild ponies were braying,
And everything in sweltering spring and
Never for foreclosing,
- but you couldn’t even hear them- Even now my
Pirates are just my artistic license, as I lie out on
The verge under the red speckled boughs of poisonous
Holly, daring such epilepsies through the brilliant canopy,
Letting the terrapin pass regardless of toll
Across my body, their saturnine fins dragging-
Even now college is over, and our lives are
Over too- for longer than I would like to think of,
though we graduated together, and came together
Sometimes moaning like two ships showing
To each other their bare-chested broadsides,
Spanish ships I would like to think of in a bottle while
The cat purred atop the washer, the dryer tumbling;
Something alright and something even better than tourism,
And maybe this happened, and maybe it did not,
And maybe that day you took me to the cafeteria on
Your lunch program with your good friend Lisa, and told
Me how different I looked, and how old and worried- How
Long ago was that?
To think of it makes me old and worried, and sleepless too,
Makes me want to hang upside down in the orange tree
Of my backyard with the invisible naked maidens,
Reliving it in my bastardized silence,
But some father has sold them too;
And how I delivered pizzas all over campus,
In the sepias of regardless holidays, mopping up after
The graveyard shift and then went jogging seven miles
Until pretzel-salty with private dreams goldenly foaming;
And on the first or second day we saw Erin like sexy lightning walking her
Dogs and she waved to me- Isn’t it funny that now
You have your lawyer and his name with you,
Whom you kissed under the kippah, the crystal glass breaking,
and passed through
The mezuzah’s blessing,
Now that you don’t have need for the alliteration
Of my homeless name,
Be it agnostic or Christian,
Or to hear the faithful axles of my
Old truck to your forgotten house returning; and she has someone else,
The bartender whose skin is as slick as an otter’s,
Who lays back in the teal shoals and eats oysters on
The half shell:
Who takes Vitamin b-12 to recover from vampires,
the sun on her bare chest glinting,
Like the hood of a car parked at a zoo,
Caracoling her areolas and bruised nipples,
She has the whole crew, tattooed and cursing
and their world lilting,
Putting ocean-flowers to her neck,
Her dun cleavage envasing;
and all I have is this, and it is
A queer thing, something cursed like a golden arm or
A monkey’s paw, trying to reach into the gloom across
The overpass and the heedless traffic fast approaching,
Playing chicken with my soul,
Pervasively taunting;
but it isn’t worth much,
Not the gas it took to reach you every weekend,
Not the flowers in the vase in the wilted kitchen-
And especially not this.