Their Hungry-Eyed Epicurian Way Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Truncated and made dumb by the silence’s
Everything,
Made to stand like a soldier in empty rooms,
Hoping to be first noticed from a
Distance,
And then passed quickly over and left empty-handed
To judge for myself
My celibacy’s saturated empiricism,
The topographies of walking alone, the heedlessness
Of trying to find the flower’s bloom,
The staunch and saccharine rigidity that apexes my
Nature’s causality like a stuffed angel on the highest mast
Of a three ring circus;
And the women have come, kissing their crystal balls,
Pushing their cornucopia of trams,
And I have saluted them from the waves, their sailor boy
With a farmer’s tan,
But I have never called them over, knowing that they would
Much better enjoy the freedoms they have to peruse
In tanned and dancing windows out in the open of an esplanade’s
Mall,
The Mercado that lays wandering over the seas, like an un-pinpointed
Ghost,
The seafarers who grab what they need to feed the husbands of
Their evening, though it is just as well that they do not linger
With things to whisper to me,
But to be quickly upon the soft back of their hungry-
Eyed epicurean way.