A Siren For Truancy Poem by Robert Rorabeck

An acrobat in the high numbers:
Rainbows that taper and billow in
The towers of trees.
The land swelters, the maidens sweating,
The paladins that we all once knew
Are taking a knee:

Mexicans, boys and girls,
Playing beneath the overpasses-
Terrapins digging holes in the sandy armpits
Of the lees.

I see you now, beckoning as a mirage:
Lingering, a siren for truancy,
But good boys and girls go from and return
To school:

They are looking socially beautiful,
But ignore them. See them as a mirage,
Pass the traffic going busily and in both ways:

Come to the greenest side of the canal,
To where the cats can talk,
And childhoods linger in the ill-begotten pornographies.

A land where your mothers are still beautiful
And housewives are in chains.
Float above the mountains-

Here is Ovid's metamorphosis- turn into a bird.
Migrate above the color changing parapets-
Calmly hallucinatory,
And in the midnights which douse crepuscule
Linger,

Observe the broken virgins,
The pietas mass produced in infinite number
In their cradles of industry.
They have all turned into something
Expectantly:

But, aside the green cages,
The lions are yawning,
And boys as old as Peter Pan are
Touching down from their infinite slumbers.

This place is rich with football players,
And the creatures whom have made themselves
Are at a standstill.
The entire scene is a still life awaiting the joy

Of an erstwhile holiday.