Purple Violin Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I stop and think of something beautiful.
Around me, the world is flipping over itself,
Bound in relation to the factory’s sun:
The greater masses have the most control;
The sparrow swims around the
Punctuating branches of the written tree
Where we build our nest.
But I cannot call this home—
Here the horses create the weather in
Strange stampedes they eat the green hair
Of mountains, until the regal entourage
Of the Queen quickly becomes withered
Old men crawling, looking for diamonds
The hoofs have crushed from coal.

Hark, I sometimes hear the sky declare,
For in all the land he is the one who sees
The farthest. I set off from my work and
Scare away the frightening winged insects
Who were trying to build a nest of sleepy colors
In my beard.
To the edge of the world I travel,
The familiar sloping of the town
Just some feet away, down to the water colored
Prairies where monastic drunkards
Are tumbling and dropping meaningful
Trinkets in certain places in the grass
All in relation to sunlight and shade,
The systems of coercions, the lilting fingers
Which say, here you go now, here you go….

Hark. Hark. Hark.
The wind jumps like a leaping dog
And blows in pollinating trespasses.
Yes, there was someone new down there,
Lost in a clutter of mismatched regalia,
Her hand fluttering like a weathered
Garment in need of mending;
But I will not go down this side of the earth,
Where the stranger needing things revolve
In places of time that intrude like
The red rubber ball’s tin horned dreams
Through the day,
The sleeping snails of sunlight’s crawl
Licking the last dew from the grass,
And the multicolored men with no names
And no homes,
Ostracized like ex-husbands
From their children’s home….

I can not understand how
She has traveled so far
And how she has become so lost.
I think before she must have won some medals
For her eyes still sport the beams of
Her triumphant athleticism.
She is sitting in a stream and reading
A pamphlet on the advantages of
The new towers which will send
Radio signals across the Atlantic.
She is sucking her thumb.
Now she is bearing her ass for
The creatures of sunlight
As they leap at her shyly and then away.

Hark. Hark,
But no, I will not listen.
I am in the weathered hills where
The horses run and carve out canyons
And estuaries for the Great Herons.
These are the things which I move around,
Asking me to stay and disappear
Through the reedy clots of Juniper in
High elevation. There, the effluvious
Light is playing a sometimes purple violin
Over her shoulder
And she is picking a scab on her opal knee.
She is perfect and lost like an ancient mineral,
So I must turn away now and pick up
The rake of my enterprise
To clean the good earth beneath the
Sparrow’s nest.