Something I Can Barely Understand Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Another day like this one, like the next.
I read canto IX of the third fitt of Alighieri’s
Paradiso, and it makes little sense,
Little sense like the way I used to sit alone between
Class, and the girl who I recognized came up and
Sat next to me, and waited until I said nothing-
Thus she walked away, beautiful legs like vases
In the state of falling, and I will never see her again,
But tomorrow I will read canto X,
And hope and pray that I will reach the understanding
Of Rimbaud at age 10,
And I look at pictures of his gravestone and imagine
Beneath it the one legged corpse of a sad man who
Could not sell everything he took from Africa:
And perhaps Verlaine’s wife will forgive him,
And weeps for him in her own grave in Paris,
I imagine, but undoubtedly wrongly....
Another day like this one, like the next.
I’ve read 100 pages of a Stephen King novel
But it makes little sense, just wayward characters on
A train trying to pose riddles, but I’ve heard them all
Before and puzzle through the lines so blindly,
Because I can imagine it just as well without the help
In swells of sunlight and the lounging of my hounds;
The dirty America of popcorn and fizz, the nude lips
In the funhouse mirrors, makes you want to think she
Has a thing for you, but wait, wait....
It hasn’t rained for so long, but I still wait for the
Solitude of her eyes,
As today I heard that my book is still at the printers,
And that I will be contacted eventually,
But I do not understand, for I do not know if I can
No longer trust the lips of faceless foreign gentlemen,
But I can endure until I can go back to the amusement rides
With someone as little as my son, and pretend that is life
For a day: A day without words, and narcissistic lines,
The unbearable sedentary muzzle of the caffeine free rivers,
The broken down swamps I could curtail by the whipping
Motions of roller-coasters, the fainting prizes, the lure
Of light and games, and to become the motion of a fingertip
As it swirls the waters of a secret pond.
Laying in the swimming pool as bright as ether in the
Backyard of a schoolboy friend who will quickly grow detached
From the green grass lawns, and the daring nights of Halloween.
Going nowhere for an entire afternoon can make you
Feel important, can make you feel the same before you
Turned out as you are, as you were in kindergarten-
Still in love but mostly illiterate, as another day bends its light
Around to the next, and I sit down and
Read something I can barely understand.