Verdant Though Killjoy Stars Poem by Robert Rorabeck

So this is how the world works: bodies so brown and beautiful
Going about and fawning,
Making the world more beautiful, and you must have seen them
Diving through the red clays of the university,
Looking for something good, and calling out the names of the
Girls they knew for them to come to them,
And I don’t know what else there was,
But failure in the places in which the dreams of the captains and pilots
Rust,
And after she is done working with me, she drives on home and removes
Her semblances of candor,
And she rests next to her husband as stranger to her as is a spaceman:
Alma rests with her husband,
And they seem now to me as if resting in the greenest fields of the
Verdant though killjoy stars.