Comfort Porn Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Serpentine scars are better left alone:
But I’ll do all of this for a dollar
Out in the desert of some war, and Christine has a
New friend,
They have long conversations together when
I am not home- Subconsciously, they have a family
Together;
And the best thing about the family is the pool:
Here is the concrete slab they’ll pour the water in;
It will be so clean and new,
And their children and their dogs will bathe in,
Fidelity and affluence esteemed by the pool;
And down the green easement, mowed, the canal
For more obscured things to swim in-
The language of the ground when it rains is a funny
Thing: They make love when the kids sail away to school,
When their thoughts are away at work, drawing paychecks;
This funny thing, the woman transformed from the girl,
Who kissed my neck, who stared at me in brilliant shades
Of sunlight out at lunch, who I caught wild fish for
And petted, and named for her; and let them drown and
Think for awhile at the end of my pole-
Gone away now, some awful war, another girl in a deck of
Nude playing cars manhandled at the businessman’s association,
Or by grease monkeys when they’re done hooking up cars:
And on the streets I can hear no guns or bombs,
But young Mexican women eagerly pushing castanets and prams seem to
Be doing well for themselves; perhaps their husbands are even now
Working and trimming and dying in those fair yards of
The girl I once knew or women like her.