Where Lies The Lost Language Of God Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Where lies the lost language of God, his affixed words
Which were the things themselves, grown sour and
Sweet things on vines off his tongue to trample down and
Relax upon the infant earth and there to spread as God
Directed them, his fingers spindling life through the rows
And waves, new heads and sprouts arising inquisitive?

She is one of the words, I know, and the sea is another,
I believe, and strung together make the first and the last,
Mixed together they join into the unction of love spilled into hearts,
And they sometimes lead to marriage and mortgage, but
More often collapse into heartache and loneliness…. And was
God not distraught by these indomitable forces spat
Out before they had time to be cooled and tempered
To fit and lay beside him, as he lounged exhausted under
The hot word sun, to be tamed beside the nude beasts of nature?

God, like the young
Poet drunk on lemonade and beer, a waltzing seventeen
Years old experimenting with his eyes on newly born
Ladies' delectable parts, the pink sugars and powdery meats,
To be stung by a sinister star spearing down, ,
Did not yet know the wild
Tempest wetted from his tongue and set loose like a
Herd of primordial horses stampeding down the interstate.
He had not the experience, a virgin to the feel of grass on
His sandaled feet, a motherless thing yet to suckle from
The pearlescent breast. Unable yet to fly, he had nothing to do but stare
At the results of his gardening, and the succulent flow
Made him come, but would not stop and lie beside
Him lovingly as he had commanded.

I don’t know, but he must have become lost under
All that ragged time that soon trampled down on top of
Him, not expecting the words to perpetuate themselves,
The sad hungering, and the delighting of the devoured,
With the words she and sea coming first and foremost,
Mounting and surging in frothy combs, in sweaty female legs
Undulating and bucking through a dangerous forest, sweeping him away, feasting, drowning his perfect garden and brilliant swing-sets he had set too close to her
Raging shores, not realizing the moon was hers.

There with him went so many of his words,
Drowned sailors and lost epitaphs to things yet unseen and
Possibilities yet unrealized by the young benevolent, our
Creator, to die so young, only 17, and in a death perpetuated
From the grief of lost love cast in her sea which engulfs all
Men ignorant enough to step into her shore when
Her tides are writhing and her shoals are red. So, He must
Sleep forever down deep in her coral beds, those later words
He had yet to speak, those spells which would have come with maturity,
Blinding cures and multicolored beasts of transformation
Hidden in his breast, are never to seed and grow upon her earth,
For now in his breathless chest those treasures lay dark and hinged,
And none may know the vermillion splendors affixed in,
The secrets her sea sways forever upon.