Sleeping Beauty Poem by Robert Rorabeck

And so these sad words moan
And continue on.
When they are not pouting
On a park bench
Alongside other tourists
Shopping for love in
Paris, France,
When they are in secret
Lonely bedrooms
For some long years now
Hoping for another chance,
Then they let their tongue
Escape like Jean Valjean
From the prison of thought
And in front of a mirror,
A lake in winter,
They set words free
Like sending off doves into
The city:
The swirling streets and
People walking
Far down beneath him,
Carrying each a personal meaning
Waywardly from
Places of incommunicative rest.
At their best,
They display their flighty
Features along the road
Like storefronts:
This is the necessary marketplace
From where our children appear
Screaming until
They are placated by the
Young mother’s breast.
There she is,
Walking everyday outside your window:
The sleeping beauty,
The girl you once knew
In whose form you find your dreams,
Whose eyes you cry out to
Involuntary in the lightless hours,
Who you reach out to,
The banks of flickering light
Your prayers rest under.
But she is not yours.
Forever distant,
She is the fleeting thing who
Routinely migrates
Into and out of her husband’s arms,
The man you cannot be,
The goodly working man,
Unafraid, he provides:
Sleeps next to her:
A mooring post of limbs of flesh
She ties to in the storm,
And though out on the street
In the open living light,
She might appear free
And from your window,
Secluded, you would sing to her
These words who like good soldiers
Protect you and keep you
Drunk in fraternal company,
She is not actually in your world,
Though her body comes this way.
Upon her breasts her children suckle,
And tiny finger’s splay on the
Valleys at her throat,
Her soul has disappeared into him
Whom she quietly sings:
These words from her lips,
Her tended gardens pollinate not for you
And if her eyes fall upon you
It is only because you are now
Sharing the hapless void:
Doing time in a high school classroom,
Passing on the street,
Shopping for necessities
Along the glowing Mercado.
She cannot help but pass by you,
Her starry children following like
Goslings in a lake where
Maple leaves are falling.
She is in her beautiful trance
From which she will not leave.
You’ve had her chance,
And were mute when she would
Have received your words into her
Like a door to door salesman
Showing your wares,
The goods you would have
Provided for her.
Now,
Locked away by his kisses,
Her belly producing from the
Labors of a fertile god,
Her soul saturnine and restive,
She goes her way,
Leaving you crowded in the distant herd
And to walk alone.