All A Little Deeper Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When I drive for two weeks,
I don’t survive very well: I grow new scars
On my cheeks like plants in sunshine:
I drive down a corridor of ruffled clouds, like
A bridal party’s frilly suicide hung out over the desert:
I look at myself at strange, furtive angles,
Flitting away from it like a frightened bird too
Thirsty to leave off it: I look in angles like
Sylvia Plath, and I think up wonderful novels to write
Over her entombed carriages, but once I reach the destination,
I scare off the easy boys who have been suckling all over
Her like flies, and I grow sedentary, and just lounge
By that corpse. Instead of writing prose to praise her in languid,
Scrawling lines like the phalanxes of a bedecked army,
Victorious and out on parade, I instead write lazy poetry I
Will never look at again. I don’t even meet her, or revise my
Fingers across her waxy brow, or grasp her ankle to squash the
Ants: I watch the clouds douse the sun, the scattering mothers who
Will soon again sow their winter. I feed the horses moldy hay, and
They greet me in little manner at all, though the dogs leap and
Nip and grow muddy and truncated until I hose them off. Now
I lay on the sheet-less bed with all three of them. The German
Shepherd is new: I had two others, brothers, who have died. I have
Been here for half a decade, in fact, and have so much hypothetical
Ink under my nails as to resurrect her if I could match her gaze for
Any amount of time; but she just lies there as the horses do,
A carriage of a girl gone away, a scarecrow, an easy trick:
There is laughter on the cusp of the hills, and maybe it is from people
Who are not real at all. And I listen to it, and wait for the falling of
Snow, which will imbed these scars all a little deeper.