Neither Shadow Nor Sleep Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Set up in the fanfare of cemeteries,
Hocking these same old words, having no business
To do with sports-
But just girls I once never knew, who clung close and
Separated near their backyard pools,
Who found surcease away from the tidal swells,
Who closed up at night, eyes pinched shut,
Dreaming of Appalachian dells, and beautiful greased boys
Who came awake like blue bells;
And I even went to her house once, and drove her in my
Old spider truck,
And she has the brownest eyes- I’ll tell you what,
But she doesn’t care to fly on my broken wing
(I can barely fly myself) So that I don’t travel anymore:
I buy poetry books thriftily for twenty cents and read
Them in my truck,
And put them down and bite my scarred lip,
And then she wearies and sleeps in unwound coitus-
That’s what she does when the busses get weary and are
Eventually put to pasture- What are those buses doing that
Once drove us separately into those clutches of cormorants,
So peacefully put together
By chicken wire and ambergris- For the world never slows
For the tired or the ceasing,
And I am sure she is just like all the world, her brown eyes
Never creasing but burning like open wells, like spumes in the
Desert
She goes on all night, thirstily drinking the amber sky,
And in its open wounds her reflection crackles constellations of
Spinning tires pin wheeling and sloughing off tears of
Gasoline-
And so she burns in her nations that no neither shadow nor
Sleep.