The Glow Of The Fading Evening's Television Poem by Robert Rorabeck

More powerful by number,
The larger we get,

And new scars held in our hand
At the petting zoo:

The otter takes off its oily pelt,
Actually an unemployed woman,
Look at how she cracks an oyster off
Her chest,
And drinks all your father's sea-green
Booze.

Oh,
What fun we could have if we didn’t
Live at home,
If we hadn’t been gone such an awful
Long time,

And the busses are already done going home,
Doing that strange dance after the entrancing
Ice-cream truck
Through our neighborhood;

But all the same,
I could bite my lip and live next to her again,
Watch the girls in their roller-skates,
The everyday cumulous-nimbus tromping in,

I could put her in my eyes like a ship
In a bottle,
And pretend for the rest of this strange sequence
Of afternoons that I am someone famous,
Immaculately careworn,
Who never had a father nor was ever contradicted
In a dinner conversation warmed
By spiced rum and the glow of the fading
Evening’s television.