In The Lowest Frigid Season Of Hell Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Drunk and humid and in South Florida
I drink banana rum: A tip from a house wife in
Park Land. I imagine she’s already decorated the tree
I stood for her, and made love to her husband under it;
And I should be reading Anne Sexton, but I’ve gotten
Board by her moribund and suicide: And I’d rather
Be smashing glass through a library or finding exotic
Lovers transforming through a thunderstorm. And I know,
Yes, this poem is for her, as even now I am out on my roof
Watching her come in, bawdy and open bloused spiced
By rum, her face dun and well disclosed: There are so many
Housewives and their daughters around her, and they roll in
With newly glossed cars. I can tell they’ve made it; but even
With all these scars, I am still fine, and they can only distract
Me for the littlest while, or if that makes you jealous, none
At all, if you think of me. Tonight I talked with a guy named
Dan, whose name is the same as the quarterback for the Miami
Dolphins: buts its not Dan Marino, but another Dan, or not
Dan at all: but he goes fishing on Michigan’s upper peninsula
Where everyone is drunk and redheaded, and dysfunctional,
And very far from here: and I love them as I love you:
And I love Dan, but he is enduring chemotherapy and a rarest
Form of cancer, and he won’t survive any longer than you or
I should survive unless you acknowledge this caress; or Dan:
Dan, Dan, Dan. If I were a better man, this would be a fine
Epitaph for him, but this is sure to be another day without a word
To greet the sun, and the Dan I met tonight will be gone, and
I will not be published again, as I would wish, but I will think of
Dan until I might see him again, and kneel with him in the ice
Near the pin wheeling mouth of the devil, and care a hole with
Dan, and dropp our lines and fish, and drink bear and laugh, and
Laugh anonymously and for all time in the lowest frigid season
Of hell.