Sun And Night Poem by Robert Rorabeck

And sun, and sun, and sun, and sun,
And night, and night, and night, and night.
We get up and revolve, eat, make love:
Some of us go down to the park and swing,
Some of us cry her name in sleep-
The beauty we do all of this for,
The opposite body we do not know,
But wish to handle with devilish alacrities-
I’ve climbed a tall mountain in Colorado when
It was past my bedtime, and the little boy coming down
With his parents told me it was too late;
But I climbed it anyway, the rolling back of false summits,
To see the hidden threshold the sun runs through after her.
The plaque placed near the end by a weeping mother
For the dead skier,
The marble aspens at her shivering throat,
All the dark things which come into this world,
And are twisted up and confused, and utterly beautiful.
And she is confused, when she takes his hand and draws him to bed.
Made-up but hesitant, her legs open another time
As dusk transcends and flint sparks her moans in the dimmed room:
All of this I’ve never seen, as I’ve never touched the inner course of
Her thigh, never seen the things she shows him time and again,
The nocturnal budding of mammalian rosaries,
The clanging together of fleshed bones, the rights to lips
And bights of teeth, and tongues everywhere in the throws:
Somehow becomes mundane, the chalice sipped every evening,
And thus unappreciated, but not for me:
The unfamiliar lake where the women swim unabashedly nude,
Each of their fingers playing in their sorority’s gay ring:
If she welcomed me with a coy nod, seeing where I
Have summited, seeing only me against the dozing clouds
Atop the drowsing world, the thin air I cut myself into for her,
And she called me down into the confusion of trees,
Where the light dwindles like a dying stream,
I would make a bed with her in the nettles and birds,
And coil into her unwinding through the apertures of surrender.
And sun, and sun, and sun, and sun,
And night, and night, and night, and night.