The Insubstantial Indoors Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Rainstorms were ruining your eyes—
As they looked beyond the castle you couldn't remember,
All of the way up the slopes of some clouds
Like a rose garden grown over the parapets,
Or this was my bedroom of a weekend's rainstorm
Folded over with paper airplanes
And my bicycle tossed into the bosom of the yard
Underneath the melaleuca tree—
Going to school tomorrow—strange didactics
Of the already abandoned children, parallelograms
Of simpler pleasures,
As latchkeys kiss and make love to their shadows
And dream of stolen fireworks underneath the corners of
The yard's palmettos—mowed grottos where the housewives
Faun—sad delights of the middle class slipping
Away from their fingertips—airplanes flying over them
Like the divine providence of dinosaurs—
And the sun big in their eyes, waiting for their children
To stop behaving and rejoin them in their places of
The insubstantial indoors.