The Night Where You Were Mine Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now I will be singing in a rodeo of empty houses:
And I don't know any other words other than these joyless places-
The places that we've picked upon themselves
And the songs that we believe in echo
The parapets of the cockpits of the shopping malls -
And the housewives—
Or I love you, smelling of my mother's magic tricks,
Or the pornographies of jack rabbits leaping out of the back seats
Of Volkswagens in the sandpits on the other side of
The canals—
And it all seems a brighter realm, made by the vocabularies
All accumulated together that were made particularly to sense
The places: you see—I've been to high school too—
And I otherwise have a sense for the unbounded catastrophes,
And I've been up and down in some realms—
That either happened real or imaginary—
And maybe the girl I once loved with eventually come down
To see me in the snow-white estuaries—
Brown skipped—veluptous—looking out of the folds of the
Blanket—Gladdened with her eyes as bright as
Ferris Wheels and her skin as brown as the lactates of honeys—
That this is her world too—and I am her world too—
And we are just coming up, like water rising over the benchmarks—
And I love you now, even as I see your echo receding—
And the brilliant sun—and the memory of the places
That no one remembers—
The parked cars and the silent airplanes—and the jasmine—
Blooming in the moment of the night where you were mine.