The Valley And Every Time Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Cold is the faith of my stream; it wakes up early morning
And bleeds:
It goes straight past the tundra of your permanent schoolyards;
It wets its lips in the chalk of your urchins and spikenards;
And it goes weeping still, past cold
Grandmothers dressed in their cold hills,
Past the rattlesnakes curling in bundles like copper wires stolen
In the middle of lightning fires;
And you keep up your mysterious household, and you even have
The mind to wipe the cheek of your early morning husband,
But I don’t mind: the very fact that he has picked you off the vine,
Because I have looked at you across the schoolyard and
Down in the throat of the kerosene mine,
And I have traveled up the deadly cliffs to find you, and to have
You committed as my secret bride; and I am doing this fine,
Knowing that inevitably you will come into blossom
And then be over spilling in your voluptuousness and
Down the throat of my vulpine columbine, who has sat here
And waited for you deep in the nursery and at your bus stop,
With eyes so green as to know exactly when to pluck your vintage
Once again like the egg shells of its lingerie stolen from the shoulders
Of its curling vines, before the collegiate baseball games down in
The valley and every time.