In The Wilderness Of A Vast And Heartfelt Desolation Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If girls are still up in Colorado,
I don’t want to go to sleep
While the aspens are still changing;
And I feel consoled by looking at their children
And their liquor bottles,
That I should be like any number of deciduous timber
Deep in the forest or a long ways up
Her rocky gown,
To change my words only before the feral eyes
Of the creatures who live in desolation;
To wear my lightning scars without a kind voice
Of comparison:
I look at her eyes far away and say this to her
That I could never belong even in her lap looking up in
A castanet of eyelashes,
Like the trunk of a velvet car: In another life we would
Have made a go of it
Homesteading in Clearwater FL, playing scrabble and
Tennis with my uncle;
But she’s married now; oh boy, and an entrepreneur,
And I am immortal, even if the world doesn’t
Care to know about it- After winter hits
And there is no more gold to breathe, I will let my
Colors change underneath the calligraphies chiseled into
The common epitaphs of prostrate bachelors,
Letting the nurseries of earthworms smell the fermenting
Perfumes of my wrists;
And wait for her to never come, and say how she did not
Know me, or look at me with any kind of consternation,
Wondering why it was I lived for her,
And sang my silent songs to her in the wilderness of a vast
And heartfelt desolation.