Kiss Your Bones Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What I haven’t said grows around the house,
Fills up the children’s games,
Engorges the canal until the otters know Christmas
And the housewives leave with divorces:
It fills up with all the oilskins of firsts love that you’d
Thought burned out quilled in the armpits
Kissing through the hinges of the exoskeletons of
Conquistadors; and doesn’t do anything right:
Ads more names to the fire: and it builds, and the gold
Melts down her honey breasts and ankles which
Are light as birds and take off my themselves- Into churches
That have no names but the beautiful stained glass,
And their banquets and baseball games of Sundays
While it has all been coming around, shedding off the failures
Of the years- Cicadas rhyming and then leaving their
Old cousins onto her pinafores: and she, your muse:
Your absolute muse of this year or any other, as advertised,
Beds down again with another man: why look at you:
All of your snowflakes are paper, and as busy as sunflowers while
Housewives remarked that you’ve burned yourself:
And you surely have: by fireworks outside of high school,
By dying avenues chalked and embalmed in their crippled
Horses: and, but if Alma could see you, she would
Light out upon the indescribable streets, pin wheeling like another
Indescribable festival out of her Mexico: and get wet and uneasy:
And kiss your bones: and kiss your bones.