Like A Pearl In The Throat Of A Rattlesnake Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Meretricious beauty, even properly astray—
Leading the artist's soul
Into the bad houses of the forests—
With the wolves and talking cats talking and
Crying over the silver dollars slanted like
Cenotaphs in the sand dunes:
But there, dying with the spurious pornographies,
The weeds spitting through the open
Throats a junked garden of cars:
Where he sings alone, after her legs have
Metamorphosed into a kite—
Scissoring with the hollow wishes of rainy birthdays:
Up to kiss the lips of some auburn pilot in his
Airplane—
Lonely, malnourished—aesthetic truth is discovered,
Like a pearl in the throat of a rattlesnake.