The Mourning Darkness Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Gaslights glow like churches on the brink of the wood:
It almost seems that, yes, someone has been crying here,
Beautiful, wayward,
Girl from Appalachia with someone always following too
Far behind;
Weren’t you out here tonight, but where have you gone?
The flecks off the lunar shrine
In the epitaph to rattlesnakes now torpid with the afterbirth
Of where she sat mourning,
Curled in an indentation in the grass up the easement from
Another road:
This is where you sat considering: This was you,
But I see you have gone, up river or down: I think you
Were following something. The moon had to get down from
Your shoulders and fend for itself.
Now this spot of the world is saddened. The thrushes are quivering,
The pines leak with golden tears. The snakes lay like breathless
Ribbon keeping eyes with the toads- Maybe one of them
Saw your car; I must ask them, uproad or down:
The road is so long until you are found; and this is the place where
You sat considering in your world:
The moon purring on your shoulders until you had to put it down;
Now it lies here weeping like milk through the grass,
The green bed where your hands touched while your back
Was up against the mourning darkness.