The Way A High School Marching Band Becomes Unfurled Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pall bearers of smoke charms running at a
Distance,
Through the seems and tresses of the pool-yards
And landfills of
Her inherited easements:
Lancelots blown like ashes over the hot coals
Of her windswept doorstep,
Tripping over her schoolyards and the horny heads
Of her alligators;
And she is in love with a doorman, by what is
Brought to her:
And she looks up into the eyes of a brown man,
Because that is everything which is beautiful to her,
The days coming like newborns slipping needily into
Estuaries,
The herons and egrets but flashes of disbanded memory;
And she drives around and looks good and the
Wildlife comes to her though it is all wild:
And she has lost her only child to the hungry minds that
Roam across the brackish charms,
And in that scrappy pitch the coos and grunts of the
Things better left unsaid,
If they were not truly what she meant:
There beneath the loping shadows of the school yard, she
Kisses her own wrist, smelling the perfumes she bought for
The wider world;
And the coital trills surround her just the way a high school
Marching band becomes unfurled.