My Dissolving Courtyard Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Vehicles returning early, like my father’s
Dreams,
Though the canal is so close as to steal away
What voice I might have daydreamed I had,
Or walked right out into the fata margona of an
Aboriginal school yard because the
Hem of your pretty skirt was so yet tremulous and
Unpinned;
It was laying across the midrange of your body’s
Watery playground,
Like something newly evolved or lost from the unsure
Rejoin where the tide perpetually leaps only to return,
Like a manmade playground with all its hope
And incubating desires;
And you were there, though you were not,
And I laid a hand upon the opal bottle cap of your
Rope skipping knee,
But it was a hand that I had amputated from a motionless
Body;
And if I did touch you, you could neither see nor feel
The leftover beauty in a calcifying river
Until like a marble braze, I did not turn at all, and you laughed
At something you could not feel and finally went
Home from the ineffectual séances and from the sightline of
My dissolving courtyard.