Strangers In My Memory Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Strange women are in their photographs,
Smiling far away,
Hoping for more attentions and the eyes of
Hands to light upon them warmly,
But they do not see my useless foreplays:
Some are as thin as in high school,
Others grow finer with the rectitude of scraped
Elbows,
Others do not appear but in my dreams
Where we share the same classroom, her daughter’s
Name, a Macintosh apple,
And the happiness of clothed flesh if unsheathed
Might conjoin and procreate like insects on
The powder mouths in the fine and high meadows;
But they do not see me,
Even if I am asleep, I am forever trekking up the
Disinfected draw, a wire sewn in my cenotaph,
A centaur with the body of an elk clicking between
The lightning scarred oaks carrying a toolbox
To the summit,
Where I can see all of them as if destinations on a
Map, when swimming, and they do not read me,
But lie me down and say now that this is enough,
And they congregate back into their professions,
And when at home they scoop ice-cream with fiancés
Because they know it is convenient,
And when they look at them they feel mostly pleased
With their choices,
And when they are in the mirror, their bodies wearied,
Soon to birth children, and become mothers I will
Never meet, they think they look like photographs
Out in the wilderness of girls so far away,
Like echoes down in the canyon’s pit,
They are not sure what they mean, or who it is
Before them.