Faithfully Home Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Trees have been growing
Up beside the streets- and the Indian reservation:
Navajos get drunk with dogs and
Fleas-
They fall amidst the trees, which sometimes
Collapse upon each others shoulders,
Like consorting friends-
Twins that multiply all through out the green
Sun showers in the valley:
They copulate up one side the mountain and
Down the other-
And they fill those spaces with a fraternity of
Wilderness:
And we sometimes walk through their
Crowds with our dogs,
Find our way sometimes, and losing it others-
And the roads twist like ribbons in her hair-
Green monument-
Like the first goddess of the earth-
Sometimes they say she is beautiful, as she spits
Out cobras and badgers
And wolverines-
And the rivers run down from the lakes of her
Eyes,
And the evergreen forest never loses her
Complexion,
Though the Indians never sing anymore-
But they get drunk and dance
Just as quietly as ancestors lost forever in her
Bosom-
As the sunlight lays trapped in her pools and
Estuaries,
And daydreams with crustaceans underneath
Her canopy,
Painting the fibers of arachnids with their
Iridescent pools of daylight,
Until all of her beauty disappears in the blindness
Of her night,
And the Indians become happily lost,
And the dogs follow us faithfully home.