Still-Life On The Verge Of Suburbia Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Every morning seven a.m.
And all those people getting up and
Starting to make love,
The professors down by the watercress
Imagining each drying uncertainty where the
The boreal slit merges with the asphalt-
Somewhere close to here, they are opening
Most doors, they are beginning to swing wide,
And they are even rehearsing for a play
Involving a girl who dated me for two weeks.
Each car is a terrapin chewing the tar of the
Road like cooled taffy,
And all the girls are married and train their names
Together like Mexicans or Pharaohs.
I wish I could say there was something unquestionably
Beautiful about all of this-
That you and he are in love and going to work,
Beginning to lay into each other heavy like two
Industrious infants learning to walk by shifts;
But I have found my change down the sandbur easement
Where the last of the alligators strum,
After you are home and heliotrope orchids have opened
Their throats lighting up like prehistoric ideas.
Already too late, god has found a better child,
And I don’t know where I am.