Under The Chandeliers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When my scars go away, you are not
There: I have no need for you to be there.
I am mostly beautiful,
And know my way up and down mountains now,
Know the witchcraft of the lay of the land,
Or I know the vulpine grin and can lay it out at
The dinner table while he and you are talking, at which
While the whole family is gathering around
Telling how it is done- up and down Broadway,
Under the chandeliers.
When my scars go away, I float too. There is
No more reason for these words, there is no more
Tattoos, or to cry this ink into her gondolas, into
A childhood of espionage and wet carpets drunken
In San Antonio. When my scars go away,
There aren’t anymore heroes to take down,
And her lips are mature and yet still hung upon the tree;
They garland there; they grapes they wait, perhaps to speak a new
Christmas carol, to make the fox leap. Or when my scars go away, I am
Out in a blizzard trying to call in my charges from frost-
Bite, those like minded marks of birth and fret:
How they did in the poetess, how they gave her a better
Grave, and laid upon her dress there, and built upon her
Coffin: How they should lay upon me still,
Or nock for wanting to come deeper in, and grow
New ones in the spring, how they give it to me still,
How when my scars go away like strangely misty acrobats,
How they should migrate and take my better parts,
Take my more conscious and oozing parts, and leave me
Only there muddled into a suburbia, holding a gentled heart
Like a chalice while the otters swim braiding with the alligators
Behind the glass: How they make love by the coupling of
Their species, and wait to eat or be eaten until afterwards
In the driven parks where lovers neck, where cigarettes
Perfume, and where I in my agelessness have run away,
Arcing as if something heavy with mercury:
I loved her, but it was an uneasy charge, but if these winter marks
Should disappear, if I should become an unchallengeable prince,
What then would they make of me, or more rightly so,
What could I ever make of myself?