Sarah Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The cops wont last forever:
My mother is basking in the windowsill;
I want to ask her if I will last forever, but I doubt she knows
If she is even real;
And I have been baptized for two weeks by these cities,
But they never felt that they really knew me:
I was too scared and alone to go and visit the grave of Sarah,
My lover,
Dead for all these years before me:
Sarahs lost in the valley: Sarahs who lives are again fireworks,
Who have spumed and have come down and lusted
Like the ash of grandmothers like the felt of reindeer abashed into
The valleys;
And I cannot wait to be alone, to have surrendered to her gray
Beauty:
Sarahs in the forts and cathedrals, Sarahs in the valleys:
Sarahs in the blood, and Sarahs caracoling the different institutions,
The colors of bowling alleys:
The city picks up and positions itself while the freshmen make love,
The answer is as true and sweet
As the Sarahs who are missing, who have almost been virgins who
Now rest in the tenements of graveyards just as true and
Sweet are these Sarahs as any songs of my memory:
Sarahs who have loved misconstrued into the oldest cities of America,
A Sarah who I went to school with:
Sarah who I last saw at her viewing: Living, a Sarah of Saint Augustine.