The Number That They Will Give To The New Heavens Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This is the number that they will give to the
New heavens:
After they find out she is in the middle of child birth
Or she is dying at the same time:
Mother a black hole: mother of
The Bible—
And race-horses—Won't you watch us put
Garland around the tree—Won't you give us time
To figure out what you are still doing here—
And I cannot call her,
Even while she is above my head wearing a crown
Of racehorses—
And I cannot figure out those devils,
Though I will be going back to school tomorrow,
And filling up my vertebrae with the bric-a-brac of
Abandoned carriages:
And it doesn't feel alright, and yet is all comes smoothly:
The sound and smell of distant traffic-
And the metamorphosis of my child living inside of
Her mother's womb—On the other side of the world:
Tomorrow, she will be taking a twenty hour train
Ride towards a place I am too afraid to spell—
And today my child is almost a grape—and yesterday
A fish—tomorrow a cheerleader and then
A real woman—not a puppet, nor a wet dream—
Something that caves into diamonds,
Something that can ride horses and read a book—
And can be seen sillouetted into the sea of far too many
Ways, echoing and waving—
For sure that she is delighted to be alive in a mirage
Of a circus of migratory butterflies,
Because tomorrow there won't be anyone else—
And you can kiss me on the cheek in the sidelines of
Far too many ways—
Remembering that once I loved you, and once you did
The same—and for now
We can only remember, as new mirages arrive on
The surface, beating their phantoms of hearts,
And building to crescendos
In the hearts of lotus that bloom in the shallow waters
That lie not so far away.