Shedding Tears Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Where you have buried the dreams
In a tin under the sand, the tide is always
Washing away the footprints of first loves,
Slow infants learning to crawl towards jellyfish,
From the shiny plates of balding accountants;
When the night is fallen,
And the cars are gone-
They have all moved away to old homes,
Gentle cribs, under the mobiles of wandering airplanes,
The local bars where the girls dance to sad sea shanties,
And the barrage of liquor keeps hitting the lips
Until there is very little sound, very little pain;
Yet, you keep the letters here all through the night,
The secrets you have extricated from your beating heart
To move on, to show the things above that you can be
Another person,
Like the changing of a suit that appears identical,
You are in something new and frightening,
But your tears are buried beneath the tide,
Hand in the hand with the hapless conquistadors,
The extinct Indians, the fossils of varying identities;
Unmarked, maybe even now the sea is stealing who you were,
Taking those thoughts away while you look into
The windows of a new house and carrying on
As the cicadas pollinate out of old husks, again and again,
Left like graduations on the mottled barks of tasseled cypress.