Waiting For You Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I live inside a finished book,
Set aside and mostly unrecalled-
A book of furtive sentences over before
They begin,
And brilliant wounds spilling like massacred
Angels out of self-contained libraries of inner-towns:
My life is driving down one road
Under a few moments of sunlight and drying yards,
A moment when you walk by,
Your youthful body brilliant and insouciant
As wet paint,
You are gone from my life, not even looking in
My direction as you leap your exercises:
Moving further and further away from the
Isolated neighborhood where I roam
Until the houses are just shells of mollusks
Unreproduced by the briny womb of a sea
Now but a swimming pool evaporated into
Green disuse;
There are no more whistles in the windblown yards,
For everyone has graduated, or divorced, and moved
On: Though I see pictures of you in strange neighborhoods,
I know they are no more real than I am now,
Just as you have stepped from that husk that once roamed,
I look to revive the memory of your unhemmed brow:
The auburn girl of fitless eyes, the claret lips who
I have never tasted hang somewhere here still:
In a cocoon of robbed intentions,
Or in the hollow amber of a cicadas’ armor on the cypress,
In a humid room where the air-conditioning has died,
And the ceiling fan sleeps in the shady afternoon;
The latchkey of an empty living room hypnotized by
Her gloomy shadow upon the television’s dusty mirror:
So here I roam, my wheels turning like panthers,
As the tumbleweeds blow beneath the empty sky
Waiting to find you.