His Penumbrae's Gaze Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Listen to the night stutter on the hem of the sea.
The moon has stopped its infinite tug,
A dream of an incarcerated god who still has fever over her;
But she is going away now, exhausted
Without a thought of the life teaming inside her,
Without a thought of men other than the one she belongs to
For awhile,
Her wetness will indent the shore like the notches in
A harem of brown throats where the crabs scuttle like
Discombobulated coachmen returned to the more basic forms
Of survival,
And the effervescing waves will lift away, as if she
Has slipped off her dress, as if the night watchman has
Sipped off the foam from his amber glass,
And drunken until his mind swims in her inebriations;
And she is going away, receding into the amnesiac thoughts
Of her maiden boudoir,
Letting the wind slip over her flaxen body like the whispers
Of a patient bachelor through her inviting windows;
And the night is alone in the sad wonder of eerie traffic,
The rush of the alien no longer minced with her calibrated sway,
The carouseling waltz gravity rips off again her surface,
The needed touch she gives mindlessly to the sun.
He hangs over in his great darkness the entire length
Of her shimmering bed, but not once does she awake to return
His penumbrae’s gaze,
For she doesn’t know how he longs to run the felt
Of extinct reindeer, or the red trumpets of oylmpic moose,
through the crests and troughs in which,
Like a whipping banner over an unsurrendering fort, her body moves;
And he remains there, sobbing in a barren garden attended
By misdirected ghosts and the sad laughter of lost children,
Until the sun banishes him with a stroke,
And she leaps up to kiss her fellow.