Just A Little Further Down That River Without My Song Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I wait for you to ring out your song;
And hang it above the tree,
And look further up where you cannot look,
To see I have been making paper airplanes
And crashing them into ceiling fans,
Even while you were in your red dress in
Your Catholic play. They didn’t make me up
To take outside this evening,
But left me back at home without air-conditioning,
Without a diving rod:
Now the tourists are here and giving good shouts,
The bravest of them performing with the lions down the
Street; and their sad daughters hang out on our block.
They write one or two good poems a day,
And pretty soon they have a collection of subtle immortality.
They will last as long as the human race cooks good dinners,
So now they sigh and go, they leap like slender rods,
Into the algae: their dresses areole their heads,
They float a little ways downstream, but it is too torpid;
They know what they are doing. The soft-shelled turtles
Know, the moccasins and the alligators know;
The fat otters crack muggy clams and dropp the empty shells
On their heads, or mistletoe:
They wait there for seven years, or, in fact, doing but this
One disappearance; I lay over them on the bridge, just
Broken glass, until there are only residence, and the moon
Is full and dripping milk; In fact, she is all pregnant,
Or isn’t that what she said,
Now that they sleep beneath me in one piece. There is
Nothing to put back together,
For I have failed to kiss her and take the bicycle from underneath
Her thighs, her inner thighs which go unkissed, and drip:
The lion’s cage is empty, but she doesn’t move at all
From where she has gone just a little further down that
River without my song.