Where I Left Off With You Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Somber novels, you give me a street awash in rain,
Lullabyed from the waves across the boulevard, where
The cheap red women are making love standing up:
The men in innocuous shadow, men as brave as my father,
Holding them as if they could hold them like the weather,
And my childhood in the median with an albino,
And thus the trees record a whisper: a fruit falls cylindrical,
Each blade of grass is mowed,
And salted as if by a fairy’s tear, for the heroes have
Gone and done a massacre, and the housewives are naked
In perpetual straddle moving halfway up to their necks
Mounted upon the Precambrian crocodiles: They do not cry,
For it is as if they never gave birth, still young, unmolested,
Treaded high, as yet in sorority, they move in unexpected
Patterns of eternal hunger,
And I watch them leaping like the bird of time at the
Apex of this bridge, joined by the auburn otter, the soft-shelled
Tortoise, he torpid and religious like the conquistador;
I suppose I can never die here, as the shadows linger and
The neighborhood’s lights presuppose the evening: Far away,
Upon another shore, the virgin succumbs topless to his lottery,
But I can only suppose the meaning of that sacrifice,
For now the workers leave their machinery in the quitted field,
The teachers remove themselves from the desk to grade papers,
And the lions in the zoo close their copper muzzles and thus repose,
And I remove myself from this immortality,
Picking up again where I left off with you....