Very Providential Eternal Rest Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My days are finally over, or in this zygote just
Beginning:
Same moon in the same hemisphere, what it is doing
To the tides, I couldn’t calculate:
All pitied up, scars all painted and ready for another
Nights journey into a bachelor’s
Consumptive sleep-
The muse bled richly across my peripheral vision,
Still leaping and elusive,
My dogs far away into a snowy park,
Sharon tucked in with her husband and child and all of
Her mugs and perfect skin;
Erin tucked in, drooling like a preschooler in day school,
Like an oyster simply pearled in its bed:
And I must become again the effervescing child smoking off
Of whatever liquor he can find,
Fingering and making rude in the waves of whatever séance,
The airplanes with their bombshell sororities of
Stewardesses too flighty to come down,
The houses of all this land going out like candles on a cake
Of a god who takes a very long time to make a wish;
So that we have all grown old and left the stage
By the time his desire awakens and strip-dances
Like so many winsome clouds before his astonished eyes,
Until they close again, like chapters having done all
That they could for us, and finally contemplating us to rest
Segregated into the graveyards like scuppernongs into a
Very providential eternal rest.