Sun And Moon Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Outside the glass panels smeared by
The persistent dogs,
There is another early afternoon where the
Sunlight is bright and angling the shadows
Away, but giving them good definition
In compensation.
Up here is a long ways, as if she were
Stretching to hang on to him, even so
In a few hours he will be leaving the valleys
Of her budded room, and though she may
Weep with the sap and pollen, excreting fertility
As was her design, by morning he
Will be back atop her again, and they will make
Love for another rutting day, cooking the declivities
And blushing ridges of her earth,
Moaning on up to him that she is forever
Faithfully longing, even though every time he sees
Her there are new shoots of chlorophylled grass,
The slender blades of infants blue and green,
And absently budded organs filigreeing the humming
Stamens down beneath her, and elk in straggling herds
Down from the mountains, and geese away in the
Overfilling waters and silt of the springtime meadow;
And stray hands of some amateur archaeologist have
Turned up another mauve arrowhead,
And some heavy hoof has broken open a crystalline
Geode under her lip,
And another mountain lion has disappeared across the
Mogion Rim,
As another barbed-wire fence is mended down on the flat
To the orchestra of flies through the sound-caves of
The old cow’s skull,
So that he can never be sure of her promises,
Nor does he call her by name, but glides there upon her
Like a fat and ambitious philosopher, overly confident
And exhausted from his sojourns into the west,
Though never once does he question her, as he bights
Her lips of photo genesis, and her leaves roll like eyes.
Bending up to him, as if on the tips of her toes,
She calls his name and nibbles his shining chin,
But never does she think to mention her quieter yearnings
For the opulent clam-shell lights of her coyer gentleman,
The softer stranger of the cooling nights, whom the sun
Has yet suspected.