Now I Have Seen Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now I’ve seen through the keyhole of an angel’s eye
The valleys of divinity filigreed with curling Spring,
And in them lay two people crooning like song birds,
Pretending they are each flower and bee, dabbing,
Inlayed upon the coliseum basin where sunlight leaps
And streams segment like bubbling yarn before they come
Together in a watery tapestry further down
The muted villages where people live and stroll about
Admiring the rushing voice joining all as one—
The symphony of two lovers….

Now I have seen you lying there like a marble fawn
Resting on a green lawn, with all the light of the day being
Attracted to your body as if you held a special element,
As you seemed an endless leap of breathing as your
Eyes strolled the sky, even though they sat there watching
Nothing—And I have seen your fingers enfold a speckled egg,
Softly like a nest in which a downy chick hatched from your
Warmth, and I wondered what it felt like to be held that way
By you…. As God must wonder every day, looking down,
Glad that he chose the finest clay and his first breath of
The morning to make what you are….

Now I have seen you every day as I wake up alone, the
Distant beautiful visage that I recall every morning since
The first day I opened my eyes upon you, like something only
Perceived through the keyhole of an angel’s eye. And I
Have longed for you the way the earth longs to disrobe in
Seasons of sunlight, to spin you around in my arms like a ride,
To make you so happy that you return to that point in
Your childhood when happiness was all you knew….
But you walk restlessly breathing sadly next to the sea,
Forgetting, as each wave laps away a bit of your injured memory,
Until you are a child of loneliness again, taken away by the
Upset plane of blue, coroneted by seagulls shrieking because
They don’t know who you are….

But I have seen you and even from a great distance I know
Who you are, for all the light of the spheres seems to hover about
You like phosphorescent moths in the backyard of some deep night,
So in my eyes all else is the darkness of a rainy sky, except where
You are, and even so far away I have seen you blazing the gaseous
Orb sounding out, spinning unabated in its search,
Like a torch carried by runners between two armies hurrying
To tell that the war is over and now there can be peace….

Now I have seen….