Robert Rorabeck - To Carry Us Away

Sarah Teasdale is buried in Bellefontaine,
And I wish to go and see her and water her grave
By a single tear I stole from the sea
Where all my cousin bachelors were sashaying
A shanty:
And if I worked all night and exhumed her long
Mane, then I could kiss her vanished lips,
And pour down them my wine,
As the cars of midnight salesmen trained
By the coal-lit road, and the sky full of nimbus moved
By, those ushering storms above naked trees,
Whose crooks are like arms raised upwards in
Hungering petitions,
As around her old house, they planted dozens of red
Roses, even as by this hour they make an untried day,
I kneel at the head of her perfumed rest, and lay my senses
Upon her unmoved breast; and call her there, though
She never knew me, by a memoir of a silent liar:
Thus I name myself while my heart still knells my breath,
Until I lie too in the quieted death, with sad egos
Loosed into the sea. Then, would not her gimlet eyes flutter
Like the gray curtains’ foreplay on the slatted shutters;
And see by the mutual light of those who have reposed,
Who are crowned by the epitaphs of gravestones,
And the fading pages left imprinted in the wilting stores;
Thus we might obtain new senses, to see by the dint of
Our waywardly species, to mutually cusp one another
So as to be mistaken as two flowers in a coupling braid
Waiting through the quieting hours as the storm, mounting,
Approaches with those chariots the sun brings to reward
The living, and to carry us away.

Robert Rorabeck

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