The Beginnings Of Romance Between The Victors Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She is married,
But she accepts and the dreams
Are like pantomimes all across the child’s
Playground wall, and the palms
Are gossiping busy from the hurricane,
And it is well past 12: 00 am,
But her glass slippers are still on,
And I will buy my house before the coffin,
In that order like the insouciant processions
Of front yard animals killing through
The mowed green,
Drinking the drippy hibiscus,
Thus the children disperse after school
And all their lives, the spinning whistlers
Molting from pubescent scars, the rented
Homes in rain clouds,
The gray ruts and furrows our friends grow
Forth from the soughed teeth of the enemy,
And in somber reunion proceed to the
Shore of the sea,
And in that behold the writhing processions
Of the flotsam and Argonauts;
See what they found, shrunken
Into the atoms of waves,
And the metropolis a careworn harem
Where cuckolded men run to new lives,
And old lives proceed to metamorphose,
Breaking against the opulent knees of the music
Teacher, and her shared obsessions
Which tongue above the wreathing salts of
The Mediterranean, mimicking the Greeks,
As we all look onward to the others
Treading behind the unperceived glass, like
Ornaments hung in caesuras, ascending the
Breakers in dire competition, until they leave
Us and breathlessly climb forth,
Christened divers, adorned by pearls,
Waitresses and mermaids serving an industry
Of inumerable sands,
kissing the
Quieted lips upon the newest shore,
Where the statues of Titans stand on their
Pedestals, shading the beginnings of
Romance between the victors.