Everything That Pretends To Learn Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Yellowy embers in a field of burning houses;
An entire society of wives losing their places,
And giving their necks up to the
Leaping sea:
There she is always doing her business,
And her laundry underneath the gulls and the
Albatrosses:
This is her busy work which makes her a kaleidoscope
Of princesses:
And how I’ve been saving myself to the homeless
Tune besides
The busiest afternoons whose bugles have been
Burning entire forests
Whose heads shimmer over the waves and go off
Like phosphorescent buttresses,
As the heavens bend down in Pieta—
They listen gratefully to everything that pretends to learn.