The Bottom Of The Wine Glass Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This room is all carefully worked marble,
And this is how it goes:
Generations of sallow faced progenitors line the
Halls, stare forwards at one another in no
Particular order.
I walk down mumbling, chewing my meal, hoping
They will not notice my stunted vocabularies
Out of the corner of my eye.
Though they have no life, I can hear them whispering
Their concern: now that I am thirty and do not
Have my own business, nor even my own head,
What will I do,
And I echo them like the muted shadow of an airplane,
The only one in the sky: What will I do,
Now that I am broken porcelain and all the girls I
Have laid eyes on have taken their turns upon the high
Dive, doing their disappearing acts into the sunny water?
I do not even know I can love anymore,
For the textures of life’s recipes are strange, barren though
Colorful, and fleeting into shadow only to reappear again
As they were, though I know they can never be that way again.
What could I sell to change this, or live in to fill me up?
They are looking at me without blinking; my uncles and
Aunts are reproductive cannibals, they have desalinated
And germinated, and now their spore walk their earth
Pantomiming their shadows:
In the hall there is no fresco, because we are poor,
The dirt in the barren forest, and I am forced to look at the
Gross amphibious bellies of airplanes farting like horizontal
Cloud banks through the sky, until they disappear into
The rosy shell of sunset; and as I keep going down,
My ancestors are getting harrier, shorter, and more like
My grandfathers, though they would not believe me-
I could tell them that all I have is this, the more and the less,
And I think about them only after I get to the bottom of the wine
Glass, for they are like other heavenly bodies when compared to me:
We started out from the juxtaposed coitus at the fairgrounds,
Some sort of fantastical ride where spores flew from his lips
Into her purse and settled on her dollar bills, and out of that
Material, we poured forth, kissing and hugging and playing
Doctors, only to spool away into different states and identities,
So now we appear to one another like stars clustered like
Smeared jam across the abyssal shore:
Looking at each other from across the dinner table on holidays,
We wonder if there really is life there, beneath the cool marble
Eyes that look like ours.