Like The Reconciliation Of Doomed Lovers Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Well sated in the casual bereavement
Of my particular socio-economic class,
My scars are fading fast, but the storm cloud
Memories refuse to yield; and even if I
Was chosen by finer men persuaded in their
College’s uniforms out in the green fields like
A moving canvas before where their ladies swoon,
I think I’ll pass, because the expectations are too
Much for me: The way the lights dim on a softly
Wooden stage, the imperfections perfect in the
Lisping homological couplets of Elizabethan England:
The gallant knife fights, the black plague, the rue
Of words chopped inside newly masoned castles:
All of that rising up and sending out the privateers with
Roomy bellies, greedy desires for Catherine’s gold:
Even then, down in the horse-shoed valley, the little
Girl is twelve years old, and she’s lost her porcelain
Doll, rolled over in the tracks not very well above the
Arrow heads, and the smoldering inside turquoise pottery:
Now it rains in a present tense, and I sift through the muddied
Witchcrafts of the Zuni’s disappearance: the grandfathers of
My white men settle like ghosts of sheets out drying in a
Caravaning line, like a virgin’s yet bloodied ribbons in the
Buffalo’s tallow: Now all of that is gone and we’ve gotten
So casual that I’m wearing shorts in the snow, and the easterners
Are reintroducing wolves in the places they’ve never been,
So they don’t know the savage hypocrisies of the ideologies
Their minds are caved in, but after so much rain things are
Revealed and come up from the earth like the reconciliation
Of doomed lovers, come upon my fingertips like a butterfly
Turning saturnine, wishing that it should always have been the
Caterpillar, for now it is beautiful, but poisonous, and should have
To leave by the windows of the stoic homestead, past the plums
Of sequoias and dehydrated ornithologists, all the way to the
Great chili forests of Mexico, there to join the bright graveyards
Of the rigamortis of chartreuse wings, fallen and scattered like
Leaves upon an empty playground, or like those ceremonial
Petals which leap from an innocent girl’s fingertips
before a bride on her wedding day.