By Candlelight Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Filling a coffin with rum—making a sea of the graveyard:
And I remember in the middle of my thirty
Years, skipping work and playing hookie with you in
A hotel:
After we made love, I took you to an art museum,
But you were bored: This is after we both kissed each other
Underneath the eyes of the albino alligator,
And you pretended to be jealous, saying that I was making
Eyes at the gringas: but you knew my heart was wild for
You—even as you made house for your husband—
What relationship we had lasted long enough for the last
Of the paper airplanes to touch down over the wet breasts
Of Miami and to be burned up with the fireworks I was
Selling for my father—
You want more and more free things—to captivate my love
In the somnambulant cages of a Ferris wheel,
Even while your eyes were kaleidoscopes filled with the broken
Hieroglyphs of your children:
They were filling up your sea, even while I called you the fairgrounds
Of my heart—and then he was home with you again,
Illuminant—matting you onto the pages of a tattooed soul,
Leaving nothing left for you to remember me by—
Until I eventually drove away, as
The animals I did not know the names of boarded the arc by candlelight.