On A Voyage Which Had No Need For End Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She said she loved me,
But it wasn’t me, but the horses I attended,
And Thomas Hardy, and his Tess:
I loved her anyway, and lassoed for her endlessly,
The colts of spitfire in the lightning storm:
I wept and on the back of the ridge:
Upon the combative plates, it wreathed,
And the spurious balls curled between the horns
Of bulls and the leather horn of my saddles,
As in a myth well satisfied;
And she watched me from the kitchen and did not
Stir, her breasts powdered with flour,
Smeared with the gristle and tallow of buffalos:
Indians cried from the sink, their arrowheads
Onyx, and chipped, resting beaten on the shelves:
I said I loved her from afar, but I could not leapt
Such a ways to her: She took other men while
The blue lions slept in trees. They did not stir,
But ate deer way up in those crooks, as the waters
Gathered and gossips in shoots of quartz,
As the sky was marble and veined with rich premonitions;
But afterwards upon them, her eyes did not open,
They did not attend my endless leap: Well sated,
They fled away, on a voyage which had no need for end.