Forgotten Cradle Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You told me you didn’t want me writing you anymore
Poems,
But you told Charley, my third uncle during lunch,
That I was a poet, and you seemed proud;
And you’ve accepted my roses so many times now:
And you wear my ring now, Alma:
And you are my bright cloud, like a glorious forest fire of
Dreams
Tumbling upward through the most invisible of dreams:
And I can see you laying large across the land:
I can almost perceive your entire penumbra, like a collage of
Feral green butterflies and trampolines, like grasshoppers
Feeding on the exfoliations of the sea:
I saw you waiting in line today Alma, without your children,
Your husband waiting in the bright shadows
Like a hungry carnivore of grandmothers- mean and really fit:
I was frightened,
But I practiced my own witchcraft and put your eyelash into
The eyelash of Picasso’s lady my old teacher gave me;
And now it is almost always done:
I may have to go off and sell fireworks: I may disappear into the
Desert and the mirages of caves folded away with the
Gunfighters and the Indians in the sizzling red pan
That we stole from you great great grandfathers; but
Now it is hardly enough even for the most
Clever of spies:
I have prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe so many times,
And now I will have you,
Alma, because I have seen this playground in the sky, the places
Of joy caracoling your body that even you can’t remember
The scents and smells of your childhood
Lost under the jaded bellies of the flat bottomed rattlesnakes
In the dry lands and basins
That once served as your forgotten cradle.