Of Our Esoteric Purpose Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Every night has a church, and begins this way,
As a dismissal for pilgrims, the long voyages of a zoetrope
Through the junked pornographies of the trees
That the butterflies climb out of like feral infants from
The sea,
Kicking and scrambling through the forgotten easter eggs
Until they become the victorious firework in the glassworks of
A storm,
Bubbling instrumentally over the forgotten crowns of the
Conquistadors who are now compartmentalized into the beds of
Sand lions;
As over this we hold hands, forgetting how to ride bicycles or
Who it was important to us who went off to war, carrying
The colors of a great flag:
Her eyes steaming across the waterless caesuras of a sea of dunes,
The burs sticking to her brown flanks unceremoniously
Until we lose all sense of direction,
And purr like the derelicts of a metamorphosis, the carbons of
A perfume or a recipe lost to the steadily increasing worlds
Who flood over us without any sense or acknowledgement of our
Esoteric purpose, just as happy as unsoldering bovines who proceed.