Nude Crenulations Of The Backyard Pool Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I can go everywhere where this is nothing-
I can give it a good go and insult your mother-
I can blow my battle-cry to windmills and attack
In empty deserts where once basked bouquets of wild
Flowers;
But, I am already gone, the hand language the shimmering
Gesture on the back of the bus
Who rose up when no one was looking and flashed
His fake knife, and told who I love with fingernail polish
In the faux leather;
But there are no seatbelts where I used to go to school:
No safety devices in coffins: my language kind of trudged
Out of the soft ghettoes of preplanned lakes fabricated for
The tourists who wanted to see what it was like to transcend
One afternoon: I am here, checking my pulse-
The tampons are floating like postmodern orchids, and at
Night the housewives don’t think anything of witchcraft where the
Gentled cypress are so tame, least of all on Halloween;
And we kind of float out here and tell other fables, like down
Under the safe gendered lights of the meat market-
The adulteries of mindful professions: I have seen you in a parade
Of high heels silver, and I lost my sisters to your nudge;
But I cracked myself to see if I was still real while being very
Young, and thus try still to make a sensible motion on the
Swing sets denoting the borders of your greengrocers, the silted
Pantheisms of ostrich and alligators above where the sky effervesces
Commercial airplanes, and your sisterhood sings well pampered
Nursery rhymes to well liquored children who mark the hours
By your sweet ellipses in their kitchen, by the nude crenulations
Of the backyard pool.