Lost Cargos Of His Immeasurable Wealth Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am lying aboard an unpromised ship
Needing to get passed you,
But you will not see me out.
Where will I go to live without you?

I am lying in a swath of your
Burned-out memory, the dead-life
Shed of your reptilian shroud
Hearing your breath against me
As I sleep in the knelling of bells.

I have swam for five years deeper
Into the singular sea.
Now I am too far exhausted of salt
To turn back,
As your echoes have stopped
Like a music box that
Has wound down—the trap you set.

Down beneath me in the swimming cliffs
Bathing Moorish in
The breathless currents of deep azure,
Spider-webbed widows are selling
The pieces of my capsized future,
Bartering through a somber Mercado.

In greenish kiosks amidst the sway,
Young students still helpful in love
Put those thoughts of me in you
Into breathless bags where what remaining swims.
They display me in the dark corners
Of their dorm rooms in the highest
Layers of the sea, exhumed from waves
Where the bravest light is refracted
And jumps to live again
Through the sky.

After they make love and smell
Of mingled bodies, smoke and wine,
Echoing the panting aftertaste of temporary divinity,
He tells her, his first love,
I once knew him to live here with us,
Through our doorways where life is cheeriest,
But now he sleeps forever
Where we bought him: through
The roots of unimagined mountains
Drowned beneath the surface,

Sunken miles beneath the place
Where he gave up in her memory
And now lies forgotten,
As she has entombed the lost
Cargos of his immeasurable wealth.