Uncertain Promises Of Rain Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When the sky promises rain,
And the highway is fuming like a volcanic serpent
Expressing the revenues of her men,
I find myself kneeling beneath you in the cut of
Graveyard intertwined with the pharmaceutical
Sororities and the cheap yellow studios
Where sometimes serial killers live but never grieve:
In the cradle of the iron gates capped by spikenards
Where the greyhound tramps of thin and flea bitten
Hides whine to be set free from in between the unmovable bars,
Where holiday is the sweet abdomen in the limp grasses,
And the topaz flies congregate around the navel
With its smells of long since births,
I pray with shadows in the narcoleptic eulogies,
And the darkening concentricities beneath my eyes do
Not pretend that you have moved away, graduated
Into the biceped shorthairs of flaxen day-laborers,
Those poor men who live thoughtlessly colored by happiness,
Who without a thought girls like you swim to, glistening
And perfumed, and play unbuttoning games with work uniforms;
Believe in the shallow permanencies of flesh and bone,
And the type of love which rides along with them
Like a carnival hibiscus in his vanilla lapel;
But I do not believe in anything but this stone, the
New heads which are slow to cave, the greater denouements,
The novels which follow the short stories of our breaths,
The pronouncements of simple truth and thus more
Eternal form: here, in French, lies a great poet only 37,
Pray for him, they say, in French, and I do, but not long enough,
Beneath the lindens and heavy oaks where the windows are
Like unobserving eyes, and the cars epitaphs of streams,
The girls simply lovers in a few bright days, they too unnoticing
Me in my habits, black ants trailing my jeans,
Everything all at once, and thus mostly nothing,
As the sky gives uncertain promises of rain.