The Forever Shadowless Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Estranged from the places of narcoleptic estuaries,
The sea cries over the parts she
Has forever lost into her sister’s coliseum sky—
Amputated from her shore,
Runaway like snowy stallions leaping from destroyed waves
Where she can not move to feel
Where winged men fly struggling over heliumed
Dreams— The closer they come to God,
The quicker they die—
They dive and leap in cloud streams
In the effluvial rivers like
Nostalgic ribbons once strung down from her window
To let them in- Now tangled in foreboding briars
Upon the doorsteps of dark castles,
Misplaced castaways of people who move on—
The helpful amnesias anchoring them to clean hands
Where they can look all the way up and recall no memories—
So, in the furrowed beds of evening’s hills
The moon slumbers without a lover
Weeping into pools iambic pentameters
Of shushing lights, baby’s breathing
Woven on the winnowing looms, spooling in exposed skeins
Upon the bared meadows in the forest’s chest—
A skin of sadness
Where pregnant spiders quiver in their
Purchased webs, egg sacks hatching in dew and evening;
But their loves have gone running to
The other sides of their worlds, hurdling
Like odysseying Olympians with no conscious memory—
There, at back doors, they strut haughtily tanned, knocking—
Without her moon, relentless,
They are the forever shadow less—