Glorious Playground Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Apertures, and openings, and arms,

We work in the service of the divine;

I have seen you rolling in the calms,

With otters basking on your tallow chest,

Eating oysters, and stalks, and ruddy anemones,

Saying your name in the waves’ knocking of the hull,

Saying your precious absence from the city’s arcades,

And wine halls, out beneath the bare-all sky, where

Your husband has taken the speed boat, passed you by;

We are the tattooed cleavers, the cannibals, the thirty year old

Baseball players, the hot-dog eaters, with our harpoons

They wish to sting you, to haul you in and operate on satin,

But I staid them with my gun and with my chances,

For I saw inside of you, and the way you moved in the

Glitzy caesuras; apertures, and openings, and arms,

We work in the service of the divine, or so is the motto,

And the company of our paycheck, and thus with forearms

Rippling, and teeth clenching like taught rope, I took the

Steerage from your carnival, and fearing the pillars of salt,

The backwards glances of marriage ceremonies and nostalgia,

I took us into the warmer torpid waters deeper

Than this theatrical fear and out of sight of your glorious playground.