The Momentary Playground Of Youth's Fickle Beauty Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Great scars- good enough for emperors
Are reduced by the sun;
Like predatory flowers, they are good and well
In shadows,
And when I go outside they easily come,
Like female peacock feathers around the eyes,
The eyes of wisdom, or of rum;
And if I were William Carlos Williams I would
Give now a gashing name,
Like a purple string of pearls upon a bugle’s
Rod;
But all I’ll do is in general misspell the regional
Beauty,
Make her wait out for hours on the gloomy tarmac
While the airplanes continue,
White chassis like the stick figures of
Angels that aren’t any certainty, but steadily leaping
Coming and going, busily by the juvenile’s
Hand, so that he does not think of masturbation,
Until he is too exhausted,
Salivating over the saltwater stewardesses,
And his mother calls him in from the parade of ants
For dinner;
But I will light off firework cones in the rain,
Their goldenrod spray defying the deluge- a safe patriotism,
About which the busy cars should come and go rolling
The dying neighborhood where all the dogs are so old
And tired that they only sleep,
And the little boys who I can almost remember gone inside
To slip from melancholy fantasies beside the freckled
Cleavage of their housewife mothers;
And I should stand outside a little more,
Professionalized by the lurid shadows, becoming
A crowded game,
Until my bag is soaked, empty,
My fingers crisscrossed by the fuses done hissing
Into the driveway’s quarry,
The earth under my feet the excrement of a nibble zoo
That passes away the senses,
And seems to make a nostalgia from the momentary playground
Of youth’s fickle beauty.