Subtracting Joy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Subtracting joy,
Your eyes fall away
Like a pendulum let loose
And with them your thoughts
Cascade,
Like two children untwined
From their whirling game,
Called off by the whippoorwill
From the apex of a red roof,
Bright geometry against the night—
So one falls in the river and goes down
Trapped in the whirlpools
Of unanswered memories,
Until all that is left is
The deep serenity of
Your most secretive thoughts,
Those sapphires and emeralds in your soul
That gleam like precious children
Under an inch thick blanket of water,
Bedded in your secret grottos;
Here, you pick up the finest things
Knowing that you can not choose
Who you love,
But he is very close to here in those
Deltas where rivers nest and taper like
Thinning dancers down into the sea;
Then in the ancient city
Where you go surfing
And bronze men come up from the waves
To hold you by your abdomen and call you miss,
Flirtatiously,
And they take you down streets
You almost recognize,
Wreathing coral streets
They make you dizzy with love
And the wavering undersea lights,
Like a highschool dance
Until you don’t know who you are,
Except that you are almost floating;
Going back to him he is gone as the place
You have seen is taken off by a wave
Swept up by the sea,
There you are trying to breathe
As the voices of ordinary thought
Begin to echo like heavy footsteps on stone,
So soon you forget who you are,
How God made you,
The tiniest child lost in a river
You played too close to—
As, from the top of the darkening hill,
From the apex of the red roof
The whippoorwill trills….
Subtracting joy,
Your eyes fall away
And with them your thoughts
Cascade.