The Decision Which Began The Natural Order Of Things Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Jack was terse.
The phone rang once,
Then not again, as if it too
Was aware that she was crossing-
Her legs: Outside, the wind abated,
And the drunk on the stoop cocked his
Head, as if the cobwebs had finally
Lifted, and he was forlorn,
Because he remembered her name.

And I sat there beside Jack,
Both of us watching her like cartoon
Wolves, surprised she had agreed
To meet us this way:
Something like a freshman menage au trios,
Chicken legs at the state college and bowling alley,
While the yellow bicycles lay slanted against
Each other, and her fingers drummed
Against a used introductory to physics book
My uncle had written anonymously.

Her eyes displayed an unclothed witticism,
And I thought she would have us quote Rimbaud,
Except she did not know him, herself,
Or, I suspected, had been anywhere near a
Beautiful cemetery, but other than that she was
All full of antebellum bone-structures,
And would never raise a family north of the
Mason-Dixon;

Jack and I were brothers,
But after that viewing everything changed,
Because one of us was certainly the victor,
He that came awash in the velveteen luxury of her
Colleen flesh- The other, it is know,
Found refuge in the bottle and the steps leading down
To where the apoplectic cats mewed beneath the windmill,
Mistaken for a shushing mother:
She did her work by the moonlight, of course,
And called up the eels, the old dredgings,
The inklings of whim that gurgle when the stars are out,
And he is sweating in the longest swaying of her
Body, the decision which began the natural order
Of things.