Girls Who Kissed Me Long Before Her Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I can spell from here the lights of the neighborhood’s
Boudoir, the greater and lesser lights, some newly
Invented or dispelled- The seething charms of tricksters
And Halloween- Kick out the lights around the
Epitome of laws, let her tell me in the dark how he held
Her jaw in bed, made her speak of Christmas trees,
Made her say the things that I would say slipping through
Her window like a radio active centipede; I plagiarize,
Trying to remember hypnotized way back in high school
The pain she gave to me, the poems she read a strip show
Out in the student parking lot, the flask she used to dip into
My envy, the wild melons that grew in the soccer field
Of good calves and taught, ankle length socks swinging like
Smoky censures: We lay on the floor of her bedroom that day,
And she let me feel her up above her bra- In afternoons,
After cowboys and Indians, we had phone sex once or twice,
And she was so proud when I finally came staining the old
Green carpet more, like an overused Victorian field of pulp
Novels and cheap hotels. She’s married but they keep coming
Into her room, the multithreaded pantheism I like to use; and
I am thirty years old- I’ve lost all my Lincoln logs, my paper
Airplanes are sleeping with hidden pornographies across the
Canal, but look at how she remains an inconstant muse,
Though what I already know about her: She cannot turn into
The forest, or transform into the sea- She remembers everything
She can use to entertain far into the night, but she is just a woman
Now, but I keep killing my green great dragons with butter knifes
For girls who kissed me long before her.