Wintertime's Wedding Party Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When we begin like this on the evening,
It is because we know no better; but these words
Are ours, and they are married, and speak within
The embers of a stoked fire;
And there returning from the caesuras of an engulfing
Basin, the clouds come tromping over the mountain’s
Lips and womb of estuaries,
And soon the pallid snows, in whose tresses
The days are receding, the colors dulling,
And within them like the glances over the stranger’s
Shoulders, as from the highest reaches the storms
Plunge downward, down away from the polished bellies
Of airplanes, and the horses of dead riders who go
Forever leaping, as confederate lovers from the arboreal cataracts;

This is the time where I should hear you breathing,
As steadily as the great hunters in their hibernating,
But far away I can only imagine you laughing, your body’s
Salts reciprocating with the sea’s salinous caressing;
Your own vocabularies are treasonous to the season,
As I would have you enfolded in my arms and these walls,
As the Furies begin their cyclical howling; they are
As beautiful as they are deadly, as you are imbibing
Warmly the daylight of your new steady; unfortunately,
Your heart is never beating nearer me, and yet here comes
The lupine pattering across the last garments daylight sheds
As it is fleeting, revealing the utter beauty of the waning
Living; and how shameful it is that you are not near to
Hold me; for me to smell your oily perfumes by olfactory,
Or our bodies to relay heat as if by the careful study of
A pacaderm’s memory;
But so wants this fate, as fleeting as love, as splendidly turns
The embellished season, and the billows resend again, as
Finely dressed as the last members of wintertime’s wedding party.