Rapture Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Open wounds abide without windows,
Here where the children are walking to and from
Points of knowledge, in and out of shade,
The foraging of budded professionals,
Two good legs on concrete and tattoos.
This is not Oregon, for it is flat and the sea
Is near, with humidity drinking slow gin fizz,
Where I pass others knew me not,
Asphodel and potted plants, I saw her last
On religion’s steps, but she was nothing famous.
Timelessly, and again, they make love until
They unhinge, forgotten aquantances, winnowed
Into newer lives with more abandon, and up
The hill the black university, the porous
Segregations.

Half a decade since I saw the show,
Old friends now progenitors, contributors to
Nurseries, farmers of cleft and plough,
Lovers on the green and bowling drunken in
The air-condition, or lifting weights indoors in
The lights: a bolero of pattering hearts and jogging
Legs on red clay near midnight applauded by
Empty bleachers. Even when I was near them,
I faced west and read in the graveyards, but
For instances my fingers touched that beautiful
Sin, a cemetery of classrooms to which my
Sophomoric ambitions handed out the syllabus
To the morticians and grave robbers,
Noting how they came in trains in full penumbra,
Glowing silhouettes hung out of cheap apartments,
The cats howling over the pool’s chrysanthemum glisters,
Only to graduate once again into the night
Where no one saw the vines reclaim them rapturously.