Time To Time Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Another word grows dim in the
Hobbies of the mind.
I’ve been playing with myself too much
To scratch her out of the earth,
Though her elbow continues to rise like
An ivory wave from the chameleon tub placed
Like a portrait up against the light-washed window
Above the train station and further on the university,
So as she cleans she can be something else too-
Something francophone and openly mysterious,
Watching the fraternities queue up holding their balls
And howling,
Never minding how the busy grass shivers by the
Foreplay of the evening’s wind,
Or how she must fart up there and the petit bubbles
Rise and press for a moment against her flower’s mouth
Before rising up and clinging fleetingly to each breast;
Nor, how she thinks of them, like packs of wild
Dogs out in the frothing sun,
And how it must be a good trick to make them stay
And watch her from down beneath her dimpled chin,
as the sun recedes swift and
Forlorn like a British battleship sunk far from home,
Rusting the red bricks where the old professors cough
Their knowledge;
And at that time, she feels as if she might be possessed
By her grandmother, a famous vaudeville actress, a
Mature woman swaying between her eyes as if in the
Cranberry dye of a bindi,
But such silliness swims away into the sullied water
Where her legs are now an even brighter opal,
But the boys remain, and she knows they will until she
Towels herself and leaves the stage of windowsill,
But never does she see me reading across the tracks
In the library’s forgotten enclave,
Nor do I see her, though there are rumors from
Time to time.