Beauty Lies In His Troubled Dream Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the absence of lies lays beauty:
She is looking up at Midwestern sky,
Just a palette, unhemmed by the artist’s verbiage:
No power lines distending from house,
No flickering news from windows,
Nor leaping of dogs from porch-
And she is not moving, but not to pose for him,
To let the temporary imprint of grasses thatch
Her bare shoulder-blades,
Her tan-lines fragile, exposed:
If he were there, he would say that wings
Could hatch out of bone, and she could float,
And that her lips were choking and black
From huckleberries, where she went naked
After bathing in the mellifluent river,
Because he liked her that way, and he paid her,
So he could say all these things
And she pretended not to know, lying down for him:
Now in those silences, she is:
The cornucopic space of empty sky,
Or the light of it through the loose quilt of branches:
She is, when the crickets come out
And the night steps out and darkens:
She is, the anticipation of another turn,
For a moment, she thinks she knows
The pungency of the sporadic earth clinging to her,
As the streetlights turn on like moon police,
And the last of the tardy children turn in:
Then she thinks she knows that she is this:
Alone, quiet, anticipatory in closing-
Quivering in the disbelief of freckled motes,
She almost sees herself extending in the fields,
But on the periphery he is there,
Carefully jotting her down with his eyes:
They are flickering the rapid succession of
Unconscious romances in the park,
Because she is his troubled dream, and he is well asleep.