From The Sky You Left Behind Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The good witchcraft of my song impedes my weary
Epiphany: see the light house in her gory sorority looking
Far and then further away:
And now this poem: all of the angels up in arms,
Getting good numbers for the lottery of lost virgins uncorked
To their dragons, slipped like tallow conquistadors
Across the canal- all of the sad shoulders, and the meandering minnows
Whose throats are speckled with the glitter of iron pyrite:
What a holiday to sleep with you, Alma, all and every night;
And new poems for you up in these burning hibiscus,
Destroying for you the words I never once thought of you for you:
Alma, why- the entire architecture and its landscaping is burning up
For you, in a world that is otherwise going down:
How he got you to come back to him while I was never around-
Thoughts formed in echoes, estranged into the estuaries of your
Silent throat- won’t you hear, my muse, the words for you,
I never thought, I never wrote: and the roads are coming home for
You- my god, and his angels, the airplanes are touching down
All over Mexico- Alma:
And I will die for you- an epitaph for your victory: watch them build
The gilded monuments all atop my throat: while the salts of your luxuries
Ululate and play for home, expressing the virtues of the rules of
A world you were too far lost to give to me, Alma, as if these words
Were the breads crumbs spent in the frontera for your lost children,
Like rose petals spread across the lips of wolves and angels,
Just like the spokes of stolen bicycles confiscated after midnight
For you, Alma: how I fail, and then how your children
Return home, anyways, happening to your own joys- into a world
That is the splendor shed in the bosque,
In the beauty that quakes from the skin you left behind.