The Waves Of Your Apathetic Beauty Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Inside the socially acceptable cars,
Preschoolers in the backseat doing their arithmetic
And patty-cake,
Looking out at a day of shopping in sunlight,
Or rain,
The easy puzzlement of their yet unsexed appendages,
Everything they need to take them outstretched to the zoo,
Seeing the oily otter for what it is,
Pomaded and clever, cracking its shells,
Accepting popcorn, believing in the one true God
Who seems to hover above them in a true to life mural
Among the trees,
Not yet the pantheists I know them as,
Forever hungrily gambling for the goddess’ milk,
The animals they see you in, the metamorphosis in
The butterfly house- In brilliant enjambments what are these
Things you come by them, no longer any use to monotheism,
The scrappers in the banyan trees, the lost kite entangled there,
The barbered lovers in the bathroom,
Or the snakes in the heated cages with the lab rats;
You in everywhere abound, free for a day and thoughtless,
Open legged in the grass and calling down your boys,
Crashing ships and airplanes, riding bareback across to
The forbidden canal, trusting the horned crocodile;
And never yet a prize to me, though your neck and things when
Allowed feed all the hummingbirds;
Yet thinking that they should call you down from where they
Are, the impossible thing by unrequited invitations
That you should come swimming on the other side of the
Glass, smooth and surreal, licked clean for a weekend of rich memories,
Thank god you are the advanced vocabulary,
The knowledge yet netted from the wilderness to be brought
Out and exhibited, made to perform like a slave
Yet brought up to their lips,
Something once sighted and romanced upon to which a body
Smooth like a stone in the surreptitious sea,
Never to be unclasped by the waves of your apathetic beauty.