Spying From The Distances Of My Ambiguous Library Poem by Robert Rorabeck

And aren’t we going where we are all going-
In weather or war,
Young men’s hearts bloom, exploded
The corsages for the proms their patriotisms
Had to miss,
Bees or maggots-
Lying in a field so beautiful with tetanus,
The rusted cars filled with mottled pornography,
Young women naked in moldy bread baskets,
And far above the crooks of leaning Australian pines,
The cripples like bad teeth being pushed down by
The ocean’s not far off exaltations
In a green mouth: And I don’t know why I am
Doing this,
Trying to call up the ghosts that are still living
Pollinated in a comely field on campus,
Riding their bikes around, their mouth-honey open
Waiting for that divine epiphany, or the addiction
Of a cigarette-
I loved the way she’d walk around, bursting through
The doorways of vane-weather halls,
Never minding the great fronts being pushed through,
What the expeditious thresholds denoted of her animal:
The cereus cavalries in romantic equipage;
It was the intimate time of intelligent feeling,
And she pricked the short hairs of my inherited forearms
Like telegraphed electricity;
And by these means, these letters of unequaled dusk,
I mean to come back to her, and spy from the distances of
My ambiguous library, or to smell her swimming naked in
The chlorinated ghetto when she had the time,
Because she is now vanished, extinct, and professional-
Well-suited and married, having gone off to
Give birth in the urbanized strata of important destinations,
Tennis courts, and swimming pools,
Kitchens with wine racks, gym memberships,
All the other amenities satisfactorily gratified into wherever it is we all
Hope to be going.