That I Was Even Gone Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Old girlfriends burn good in a drinking mind:
Girls in chariots with cottage cheese behinds:
And oh well, it was never a great loss-
I don’t suppose she’s ever re-entered a playground
After our separation,
Never felt the black paganism which I tried to
Transplant her in, through those cold
High school lakes not so far away,
But back enough a bit to call them really done:
I suppose now she’s stuck to her air-condition
And restaurants,
All of her casual and usual and typical haunts,
And that is just as I had planned,
That she could go her own way with her not so different man;
Or, it is the same way as her family plan,
While I am in the green with sea-green iguanas,
Trying to breathe while thinking of atypical mommas:
Girls who don’t get up in the traffic of her junk,
Girls of sky and girls who can not be caught;
And it makes me as celibate as a great inventor,
But a great inventor who can never fall down,
Who walks through ice, and breaks into houses just to fall
Asleep;
And I’ll sleep in her mowed yard one day, a grin to the
Typical moon while I pet her purring cat,
And make it my cat, and by the morning I’ll be gone,
And she’ll be so unworried that she’ll have never known
That I was even gone.