Towards Her Abandoning Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In these young stages of your echoes—
I will not fear you while I am your teacher,
And my poetry is remiss to echo or even to include
You—
And the part of my soul that includes you is
Devoid of aesthetic beauty,
Because in the summer the planes come:
It costs a week's paycheck to ride upon them:
But you can ride over the playgrounds,
Or you can ride over the see—
The sun shines it's a$$ over the open abuses—
The housewives like the cloy bouquets over
The Bay of Bimini—
And the horses of the cavalry gallop—until they
Are eaten by the spears of the sun—
And bottle rockets jump up like crickets to meet
The caresses of daylight,
As if all of their cavalcade was a soap opera
Delineated to the afternoons of a daydream—
And not a cabaret in the midnights of
A theme park where my darkest muses still come—
Nocturnal roses perfuming beneath a Ferris
Wheel refusing to move on—
These are the places it cannot keep—as the song birds
Fall into the briars,
And I love her ceaselessly, even though abandoned of
Her amusements—having to awaken again tomorrow,
To imagine her singing to her children
Awakening upstate alongside the rivers she had to
Follow towards her abandoning.