Once Around Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Words loom like a forest of unsettle men:
The trees shiver like those men who have seen
Action, and their brothers mutilated like tossed
Grain into the waves,
And acrobats falling from thy sky into the fire
Beneath the tent; and for a moment it should be
Beautiful and without conclusion; but that is
Such a certainty, how her form shall be revealed
As every one of her ancestors, the wardrobe
Unfurled, her lips metamorphose into weeping
Children underneath the heliotropic sky where
The braided willows swim, and the vaudevillian
Migrations repose with their gawking brothers:
This I say to you, as we drink together at a table,
And the wind howls and the wolves pretend to be
Beautiful men. We should sit together and watch her
Leave with them, and drink to her, and now how
Her throat will open like curtains peeled from a stage;
But where is the audience when there is not a footstep
In the snow; and where has he taken her so that we
Cannot hear? But she paid for us this liquor and filled
It around the open glass, that another man’s lips blew
Taken like something naked and glowed from its kiln;
And she left us this way, well situated even though
All the lights are out, and the trees are moaning like
Starving men, rattling the sky, but she is taken out and
Passed amongst them all and will not come again.