Look Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Look.
And how happily innocence plays
On the underside of the opal coffin
Like light-giving minerals in a cavity no
One will see:
Clinging to someone she doesn’t know,
Who doesn’t breath:
Her lips are twined like barbed wire in
A kiss grown tight in a struggling tree,
Her shoulders a high wall hiding the wildlife
From the smoking highway;
There is a forest fire in her touch,
And an ancient lake; her leg has been broken
By a crush, and mended by a snake bite;
This is where she dreams, her curtaining lights
Cast from the underside of the little bridge
Upon the dark waters of a skip;
She is coiled up next to a cell of bees
Feeding their larvae the pewter essence of a gift-
In the earliest morning she cries dew on a
Single blade of grass in a patch of sun on
A mound of sand, where the ants wake up
In a red kingdom and eat her cherished sorrows,
Though she remains the embrace of a thorax,
And the tracks of insects on the desolate yards.