The Most Woebegone Sensations Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Moving me this way to heaven; it is my hell,
The presocratics waiting for me with lustrous warmth in their
Eyes standing outside the baseball games of all of
Our windows:
The strange conjunctions that they want to show us down
In the pit they’ve been mining into Eden.
Their flaming swords singing, and turning up opulence of
Compounded words, like endless insects stuck together
In what must have been their throes of love-
But they will never have to love again, like cut flowers who
Somehow never find out how they are going to die,
For they stand so forever in the statues
Of their ecstasy, the same way I want to keep you in my mind,
Echoing like the caesuras of the oceans,
The saddles between the mountains, the undulations of
The zoetropes and the windmills,
The specters who wake up underneath the cenotaphs who
Will forever bear their name:
Just as the rose bushes are blooming in the front yards
Of kidnapped debutants, pistilled in the perfumes
Of the most woebegone sensations.