Just As Beautiful As You Are Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Distending avenues of the glutinous eels in the shallows
That we all knew:
There all day and black as forever with their surceases,
Like the cessations of every sex and every love:
The last flights of airplanes
And their stewardesses who are approaching their mid thirties;
And all of it repeating with so much affordable luxury
In the beautiful primary colors of the foxes and
The rabbits in the fables
That the preadolescents know while they are in the cars
And going to preschools out from underneath the ceiling fans
And underneath the power lines,
Going past the cemeteries of the ancestors who no longer
Look out for their best interests;
And the days that they know shall accord to themselves like
The evaporations of vibrant colors into the shake out of past
Tenses,
Knowing both sun and showers, mailboxes filled and emptied,
And even after they have long since been kissed and tucked into
Their limelight’s bed by the mothers just as beautiful as they once
Were,
The mountain still will seem to look out forever across
The vast cerulean sea that we both drove near to one day Alma,
And I told you it was just as beautiful as you; and I hoped that you
Would remember for just as long as it took for those mountains
To sink back underneath the sheets of our vast and ancient love,
That I promised would even last forever, though we had metamorphosed
Like our grandparents back once more into the effervescing
Borderlines of the torn mountains into the cascades of the very sea
Who is just as beautiful as you are.