The Changing Instrument Of A Woman’s Metamorphosis Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You cannot say that
You were not once my instrument—
Fitting into my hands,
My intimate plough—
Did we not work together,
The sky laying out in blue velvet curtains
Watching us,
On those strange and eerie fields
We lived together in after high school
And before adulthood? Those small
And frightened fields hidden in the
Violet Forest,
In the rich land where collects god tears
Cascading down from the mountain,
The coal black and onyx mountain
That I sometimes heard call my name,
As you rested away in the shed—
Heartbreak pooled and gave us life—
For a little while sustaining us on those
Green shoots, the rustling stalks which
Spoke sometimes dreams peaking out
Between the rows, little ghost children
Running against your coppery legs,
Running against our flesh like tiny pale flowers
Peeking up at us—
We thought we were safe,
But we did not see the wolves in the forest—
And I did not know what you were—
Changed, a professional woman leaping
From my hands in a blue buttoned suit,
The wolves took you in their teeth
And disappeared, as if you were a precious necklace
Hung down from their jaws—
I wept and let the fields grow fallow.
Far away, I could hear you changing into
The distant crystal things, the wolves’ howl
In the crimson ankled city where I imagined you:
A marble vase filling up, a kitchen appliance,
A soft satin sheet curled up and waiting,
A lamp by which another man read—
I could no longer feel you in my hands—
A dragon killed my friends so I planted them
In our field with the tooth of the serpent I slew,
But they did not grow back
And you did not return to collect in me—
You had changed so much, so many times,
You had forgotten what you once were in my hands—
Tortured, I could still feel your handle in them, panting and curled,
But I could not stay— My soul left, drifted upwards
In the lonely mountain where it pined
As lightning stripped the horizona in electric briars—
My tears rolled
Down the midnight slopes and pool in the valley beneath,
So the forest rose up and reclaimed our land
So no one remembered, though my tears come still
Down from the dark and lonely mountain,
A river running lost over the empty land,
Losing itself to evaporate at the shore of the desert
Where the forest ends—On the horizon, the clanging
City in metallic bloom, where you work now,
A foreign instrument, new technology,
Useful only in his professional hands….