Like An Otter On A Calm And Salty Sea Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Your house is proof that you live here,
But I still prefer to eat with the feral boys in their woods:
The night in its bed chamber making love to
Invisibility,
The saints in your blue sheets as if your blue sheets were the sea:
Walls of different color looking over the sea:
Alma’s soft brown legs curling in the caesuras, rising like
Cenotaphs or mailboxes:
Alma’s beating heart a casino, a lucky streak down a ululating
Row;
Alma’s children the nectar in a Hollywood garden
Above whose innocent caps Alma’s fingers winnow as she takes
Michael back and forth to school
Down Cherry row, where the crystalline animals play in the tiny
Little gardens choking with
Spikenard and scuppernongs, with the dogs barking;
But Alma has a new haircut: Like a vast-hearted sailor Alma conquers
The day,
The cars and airplanes riding out before Alma,
Until she closes the treasure chests of her eyes and floats to sleep
Like an otter on a calm and salty sea.