Penumbras Of A Stranger Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Beginning to grow beautiful-
Metamorphosed by my letters and drinking
Habits,
Getting to be frenetic and daubed,
Masked by the penumbras of a stranger:
My face uniformly mottled like an ancient,
Though subversive book of forgotten fiction,
Or the next pseudoscientific hike of impossible mountains-
My real scars now are hidden by my jean jacket:
The hollow between my ribs hurts like sore
Teeth, pulled out from where they took her,
Like a restless, stolen flower;
And now here on the mountain it is raining,
And upstairs the simulacrum is drawing and singing
The few things its French inventor gave it unique copper gears
To draw and sing;
And I have hidden on my person the lichen and pyrotechnics
For the capital of a new bride; and so I sing to her
From my body’s convertible wounds- I fill it with my vociferous
Ululations, and the truancies stolen and hidden from
School buses;
And from my backyard, though it be endless, I encourage
The hooped zebras to bend down in the mowed grasses and
Kiss the hyenas even though they are breathless from taunting;
And behind this the virgins are getting naked across the
Canal, and now they are dousing and laying amidst the holy’s
Crinoline,
Just as similar to the eclipsing blindness of a scene;
and they are shivering in their rainy, crippled
Bedrooms, uncrossed with letters awaiting, to be broken
Beneath the waxen seals, like the lips of a queen or one
Of her hyperventilating ladies in waiting.