Linear Reckonings Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Soon we’ll all be married,
And fighting up the stream,
Those cold Alaskan eyes weeping with oil
And prehistoric moose which step so high
They forage on the cherry moon;
Where we scrape our speckled bellies
Under the caves of insane snow,
We give our children to the slough,
The greedy lips of claret lobsters and their claws;
The politicians’ leather boots,
The slick mustache, the shoe store in Charleston, SC;
Then the honeymoons we’ll have,
The sad events, the overweight aunts attend,
The junkyard of used tires under her skirts
In the places we can afford, Hawaii
And the paper church soon to burn from
The cloy foreplay of hermaphrodites,
Dressing up in Falls City and the bends-
Her eyes are a hungry light- turned off, that is all-
Down by the river where she woke up
She learned to write her name,
And his name on her palm, but that is all-
They live in a trailer in Michigan, and that’s what
They called their son, and their second son, Jesus-
He performed miracles with cigarettes
On the swings in the park next to the river
Of flotsam and used tampons where the
Professors water ski- the minor smirks of
Small publications, the ransoming of life from
The green reaper for a season, maybe more,
Where the trees are ancient and shadowing,
Where the vast oaks are the real immortality,
Where the roses weep at the end of the swift
Season, with the ruddy apples in the farmer’s market,
The stalks of nettled corn, the grandmothers in their
Shawls walking to the daughter’s boyfriend’s
House to retrieve their grandson who has run away,
And will be held back a year;
The blushing leaves fall like kittens down the steep hills,
Where the wild scuppernongs grow bitter on the waxy vines
Upon loose spools of chain-link fences forced to the ground,
Where the old blue lake weeps in its basin of carp and willows,
Down to the graveyard we all attend;
Riding our Christmas bicycles, our glittered roller skates,
Our tassels streaming out behind us,
The noise of wind and revolutions down the breakneck hill:
The beautiful and the famous, the poor and the kind,
In the dirt of the cold peninsulas of the final depression,
On the seventh day when god rested his David lost
His arms as the wind whipped his clothes off him too,
But the graveyard is beautiful in white marble,
And budded with plastic bloom torched in tin,
In epitaphs grander than the bodies they denote
Restive in autumn’s red oak blanket upon the luxuriant hill,
Just another season here we are again
Floating through the thoughts of a young god’s finite will.