The Full Poem Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The full poem is in her lips,
Pursed, she cannot spell.
Opened, she kisses him and he goes
Home and grows a garden in his sleep:
These lines are not for real,
But the pressed ivory of piano keys by
A child alone in a sunny room:
Searching for what she will become,
As bees sing softly in grandmother’s garden.
There are bright days she knows,
And places she has walked to where
There are things she cannot say the sky
Shows in furtive glimpses,
Things she believes are real though there is no proof,
And nothing can be said,
Though this is what she thinks of as she
Waits for the bus to take her to school to learn,
And the days flip over like rabbits digging burrows,
The indescribable successions of lives and deaths,
And the saplings which grow up in the make-believe
Yard who will never move unless coerced by the wind,
And then ever so little,
Though they may live forever but not
Relatives and distant loves,
And when the rain falls like piano keys, like glimpses of
Little children laughing unabashedly through sorrow,
Then as if in a trance, she sits and watches
The world outside her home slicking the trees
And filling the sky,
And does not say a thing, but I know,
The full poem is in her lips.