Our Communal Fieldtrips Ot High Schools Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I can hear the topiaries of my jungles:
They are outside the opened windows, and my skin is like
The open throats of opals;
And oh how this is all wrong;
I should be vagabonding, or back to selling Christmas trees-
If I was a better person, I would know something classical;
But all these nights away from the red bricked and blushing university
Has shrunken me:
Now I am blown away like a dandelion, like a lily;
Oh, look, Alma, but what has shrunken me- I am on a quiet voyage now,
As emptied as a seal into the refrigerator of the great northern sea,
And all of these things whom I had thought once were beautiful
Have just gotten a big laugh on me;
And my body finally turns browned and beautiful, and the captain
Finally wakes up,
And all of my old wives turn back into a doctor’s office of trees:
And the bodies push together to see all at once what is ailing them,
And the sea brushes them in pantomime,
In the fake science of cowardly heroes; and then we all wake up together
And take our communal fieldtrips to high schools and then to far away.