I Lay Down Poem by Robert Rorabeck

All books should begin
With sunlight, with rain,
With jovial violence, with her lips parting:
A cliché, a motif,
French women getting changed unabashedly
On the red wet diamond of baseball,
And men singing and
Swing clubs, making love furtively
Or running away from love and climbing
Mountains to see her from far away,
And feel her breathing beneath them insouciantly,
The transcendentalism of better pilots,
In the freedom of misspelled names and
Open dictionaries,
The thieveries of survival and recognition,
And go down in the cathedral of wet and weeping
Bows, holding hands, praying standing up,
Recognizing the newborn mathematics of her legs,
The immortality of her swollen breasts, the
Unprintable memory of that evening,
The indefinable beauty of her eyes courting in the
Dimming glow, the crowding of this loneliness
Sparks the ether of these very woods,
With words soothe the rattle of the poisonous
Viper and fill her mouth with verbs and tongue,
And wash together in the dewy pinions,
In the indigoed vespers, the stars milky candles
Wavering leaping over the summit high above,
Cliffs as her neck stretched in this shower,
A monument in its ochre lather,
A woman far away, misspelled, begins the language
I lay down....