The Prison Of Your Absolute Denial Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Our combined bodies are slowing down the earth-
The waves are pausing,
Giving off flickers, like organizations of
Dragonflies and lightning bugs. Those chemists,
What are they doing-
Little daughters are forgetting to look at themselves
In their pink vanities,
And they leave off for school with empty brown bags,
Shifted through by blind verisimilitude;
The pretty yearling-things don’t care that they are starving,
So unprimed trees grow heavy and severe from apples un-plucked
In the over comely orchards;
And isn’t this all utterly strange that I shouldn’t see you anymore-
That I once ran around you in a park organized by
The successful perpetuations of our president,
Where Benjamin Franklin was playing his latest
Glass armonica,
And he was too busy to understand how you came at me
From all angles through the deciduas
Of ankle-deep housewives chirping as they pushed such trams,
Smelling like kitchen-sink sunlight, everything moving up and down
Due to the propulsions of our relative bodies,
Speckled incest reposed in ululating recreation,
The shared weights and levies of a fieldtrip’s seesaw,
And how I used to chase you inside a fable of my mind,
Leaping at your unreachable ankles, until I declared that they
Must yet be unripe but amusing,
My glances ever ready to find just a homeopathic teaspoon of
You somewhere along the pubescent hall’s
Perambulating road coarse,
Leaning back against the piratical lockers, eyelids painted like eager
Bruises, like violet punishments,
Your supermarket bra graciously stuffed and reeking of carnival perfumes,
Of tennis balls and freshly butchered salmon,
Areolas the flambé of kiwi and wild scuppernongs;
And at night your mother sponge bathed you underneath the
Calming whisper of the ceiling fans;
But now the familiar traditions are all changing,
New men are migrating across easy borders,
Climbing defenseless shoulder blades, innocent pilgrims
Hearing that you serve good sin: They’ve crowded me out onto
The street side of nocturnal Catholicism and you don’t care,
But I’m left in earshot of that pantheistic celebrations,
The nature worship they caracole you with;
They start gasoline fires and rev and whoop
As you try to re-christen them with domestic alcohols,
they en-crèche you, horned, rutting,
Like stags prancing around a doubloon-ed aspen;
And the tricky sacrifices of your body language slapping like
Coins making wishes off the blue anchors of their tattooed biceps-
You said if I’d been more
Attentive to my needy stanzas, or if I’d stood still while you drew blood,
While you went to work piercing me for your cruel brooches,
But I flinched, and I fled into the shadows and all the things which
Have no space of their own- They are happy to have me,
The diasporas of what good honest men would refuse to own,
And they’ve hidden away the salvations of light which might
Pull me up again and place me like a locust practicing
With his wasteful band on your
Willfully paralyzed abdomen, an outlying caress along vibrating
Canyons, the enlightened spaces who seemed before fully serviceable
To me, but now look wearily from
The other side of torrential windows,
The voided apertures of condemned lighthouses,
The sightless towers of despotic kings,
Where the horses bray trapped within the spokes of sand dollars,
Where the glass is coolly flawed, and it is known as if looking
Upon the cold granites of openmouthed tombstone,
The sad afternoons of reviled dentistry’s,
The possibilities of a dark plague fill up in your pantry,
And the dead lie there gossiping and watch you fall back onto the shroud
He pressed you like a moth or a flower;
You press the mouth to the pillow without anesthesia,
Folded into the collection of his mortician’s almanac,
Like the instructions for planting fangs in that season:
You pant
Such living death blooming in the senseless wreath; and it is all
Drawn out, so that it is just the scar perfect sunlight leaves on
My memory because I stared too long at you
Waiting at the bus stop, sundogs and all the lions roaring,
The alligators panting long-tongued, grinning with the terrapin like thorny
Presents beneath the poisonous holy,
Red-cheeked and flushed beneath the venomous sky,
Like a virgin willfully suffocating;
And now the world isn’t real:
There is a sinkhole in the middle of the highway
And its art is crippled by the offspring of its toothy perpetuity,
And I feel as if I weigh just as much as the sum of all of most everything;
And all that I am missing is the weight of your supple
Wingless body falling, being carried through the required threshold,
Fingerprinting the teak of a good wedding for luck;
And the scars are like hooks, and I find that I am being carried
Far away up into another happenstance’s birth,
And you have gone your way through the currencies you have chosen,
And mountains build themselves up around you heartily fraternitied
And strong because they have the sense that I should have
Wanted, that your body’s presence has a substantial
Meaning; it moves comparative to Lake Tahoe,
clear and deep and beautiful into
Which a entrepreneur, young and banked
should look down into forever into
That absolute reflection of your essence to which all oceans
Seem to diminish,
Into which truth distills prohibition’s collective liquor;
And it is to this place that all bodies are moving, like
Tourists driving to a favorite picnic spot,
In togas and motorcades up the hill of Cavalry;
But in it heartless lawn is required the dour spirit of your post-modern
segregations,
And to it reopened fountains I was not allowed,
for the flaming sword is panting,
Thrashing alliterative and vengeful
before the timely garden whose knowledge I
Once tasted with you naked and throwing,
But to it you have uplifted your fickle chastity,
And the world is falling into you from all angles,
Like so many instruments pitched into the fires of your bosom,
And yet there is no undoing this knowledge,
The songs that I remember singing,
That I cried for you like a child in a latchkey wilderness,
But to the feral entreaties you wouldn’t choose to come,
But toasted your glass and smiled, and kept the men revolving
In your bullpen like powerful bullets in the chambers of a gun
You just stood there leggy and smoking
After taking potshots at the world I had created around,
Tearing down the canvas to which I inspired
So that there was nothing recognizable except the prison
Of your absolute denial.