From The Eyes Of Young Lovers Whose Beds Are Already Burning Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Speedy bicycles far beneath the motionless skies,
The saturnine gentlemen burning like candles
Skull-caps brushing the fertile crescent of commercial
Airplanes:
Bowed sheet-metal echoing in thunderbird stilettos-
Don’t get me wrong, but it is impossible to be
Young again, to play stripped naked in the weeds
And pretend it is any other thing;
And yet the atmosphere is so beautiful next to where
Tourists f/ck, but it is why they have come-
They spend good money to get drunk under her
Gown, to seed their destinations within the deeper
Ballrooms of the turquoise furrows,
The caesuras of drowning unicorns; it is the
Only thing, like a Ferris-wheel turning even if
The bleeding won’t stop-
They won‘t shut down. You can’t escape her eyes,
And the way she fireballed as you went down from
The mutual consumption of a harlequin flue,
Half-avian like bird-men,
or like a Precambrian stream gushing newly unresolved
From their changing climax of your evil romance,
Clots of alligators and coelecanth- a better thing not to
See, the traffic blinded, the liquory holidays disposed up,
How the terrapin proceed over the rusted crowns of conquistadors
And their diminished saints, into the cooled beds of sands,
While the tourists sleep hand in hand, or in their family cars,
A derision of anniversaries and commercialized planets,
Air-conditioned, leased- But
This rutting of the torpid and disposed, clutched in the motes of
Sunken castles and baby’s breath,
That true love comes this way only when the lights are out
And the waves are fully roaming,
Dispossessed bachelors on the other side of the canal
Hard up and singing rummy shanties; and it is all over by morning,
The young are hatched and speechless, and given little chance;
Their room is a mess,
Yet by instinct they follow her, revealed like pattering evidence
Beneath the spotless sun,
Slipping through the mouths of gulls and waves
Like white cutlery, immaculate and disappearing
From the eyes of young lovers
Whose beds are already burning.