One Canal Further Over Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Hey baby doll- now you are in my visions
As the clouds cloud over the snakes milking the cows
Or the housewives just watching them
With ravens in the nets of their eyes:
The snakes get as fat as fists, like the grasshoppers
Eating the corn, or the bodies in the river
Like a beautiful ribbon tangled and clotted
Like nettles in the fine tresses of her bosom,
As the waterfall falls over her, and the butterflies
Return to another forest- As the bicycles sleep
Without conquistadors down in their
Slow crypts beneath the otters- with the housewives
And the truants each going their own ways,
Until the doves are folded into the nests of rattlesnakes,
And the sugar cones pile up her banks,
As the sun falls thinking of her in a zoetrope of smoking
Sugar cane, obscuring the fields one canal further over,
And thus keeping mystified those other worlds.