The Night Before Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the forest, a cold meal of rain:
Nothing of phone calls in the forest, and the caterpillars
All balled up- in their stomachs a chrysalis:
The hikers gone away with their ice-creams:
Gone to hibernate in their trail parks with their working
Girls who have come home from
Their own ways:
And the graveyards bask, and the airplanes fly so far away to
Speak of no meaning for it;
But with one looking up, they must think of the passengers
So warm inside, like coins in the smoldering cul-de-sacs
Of an evaporating wishing well:
Where will they go now that the moon is hugging the saddle,
Its face as big and preposterous as a church
And down from the ridge, and through the spindles of aspen
Stumble old girlfriends, falling toward reason
And away from the darkness of the summit where one supposes
Nothing but a cairn of stone sits and awaits
The sappy blessings of juniper who cross themselves across
The path the elk hurriedly made as they went down
The back way and into town again
To look through the glowing transoms of the evolving girls
Who spill out their innocent light from the palms of
Their windows,
Beckoning the feral princes they easily tame: breast feeding
Them with dishes of wildflowers they have learned
To distill- so by their own feelings they climb up again,
Like colorless fires without sound that caracole through the
Boulders of the darkness
Until they intertwine beneath the watchtowers and go no further;
Buoyed in the presence of an ethereal theatre
Until they remember their own, empirically,
And thus fall all the way down to their beds of sleep,
As easily as wishes blown from the shoulder blades of
Their candles,
thus to haunt the lurid bellies of their roofs that hood them
Like the breasts and the navels in an orchard
The early morning will harvest with its pregnancies of surplices
Flowing across the bodies flooding across the carpets
And once again being let out doors- to enjoy the sounds of
Schoolyards, like song birds themselves cheering beneath
The paths of a mountain high above them
That they cannot even remember laying in its airy slumbers only
Just the night before.