Even If No One Would Listen Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If I could tell you how beautiful she was
You would never believe me:
You whose language knows my tongue, but I try to
Sing her up every morning anyways:
How she never had to finish school to be everything more
Than beautiful,
Even while we were truants, or even when I found myself
Alone under the emptied school buses:
And all of those houses were occupied by us like the
Lightest of tombs,
And the airplanes sparkled and the pools were chalices
For diamonds;
But neither of us can know the real meaning of this muse,
Because she was birthed in the
Boundaries of other throats, where strange birds gossip
While brown babies are being born
In the hurried fronts of dying mariposas whose
Glorious poisons accumulate across the rugs of
The bosque;
Even though I have cupped a hand across her unclothed boundaries;
And I have inhaled the ovoid hallucinations of her oasis:
Even today while her children wait for her back on
Cherry Road,
Alma came over, and I tried to sing for her a crude mirror of
The beings of her soul;
And she was my muse, and I made love to her,
Even if no one would listen.