School Of Tadpoles Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Some instruments are made for you, laid beneath shallow
Waters where the freshman go jogging, where soft-shelled
Turtles niggle- Where cheap jewelry is lost in the cargo
Of alligators, our millennium mascots-
They say you have not identified them for many years, for
All your times of learning, how the trees cried as insignificant
Lovers broke away from holding hands on the mildewy
Walks between campus and the cafeteria’s inedible lunch:
The slow pedagogy of the grayest professors winding down as
If in a dream echoing from a well, trying very Delphic for you,
But the words are at a loss and in need of a higher intelligence
Quotient, to bring about spring, the singing of varsity cover bands;
I tried to become something for you in the sweaty halls all
Around you, in the city as big as a Jewish ghetto still growing up,
Getting drunker but rarely going on the swings:
Black men panhandling and Vegan tramps digging into dumpsters
For fresh vegetables and cheese pizza around 4 am: After seven
Years, the angels were all in chains serving the football team,
But the new female recruits under the deciduous canopies continued
Looking so good. Eventually, I mumbled away into the west,
Into the breathing of mountains and the sticky keys, reintroductions
Of words and fumbled poetry, the lines spun out for things you’ve
Never found, like a sub story in To Kill A Mockingbird edited out
Because it made no sense, and this was her only chance, but you
Can still find me there if you start searching, seashells and feathery
Whispers, shotgun houses lilting, things sunken in the school of tadpoles
Soon metamorphosed
So they will forget all of this and only swim further away,
Growing legs and breasts which move them from the shallows, into
The green lands and neighborhoods I will never go.