Rooftop Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They’ve turned off the television, and quiet now.
School children winnowed into beds weep for nightmares,
And in the aloe the frogs chirp and mate along the old rebar.
There is pornography stolen inside old cars on cinder
Blocks beneath the Australian Pines across the road,
And a G.I. Joe lies lost in the sand dunes and cockleburs.
A suspected kidnapper patrols the road, too late for harm,
While the next door neighbors, retired, drink beer and look
At their citrus tree.

I lived here, and watched the ditches flood, and kissed a girl
With short blond hair down the road; she wore a retainer
In her mouth, and tried to teach me a lesson from her bicycle;
There were bees steady in the hydrangeas and a canal they
Eventually built across when they paved and widened the road.
One evening I had a bushel full of firework,
And sent a fireball all the way down the street; Now, as I
Put coins together for nostalgia, after failing again before this,

I return to six years old, for I only live here until second grade;
There is the rock garden with blue cactus where the white shepherd
Killed the father rabbit, and I heard of death, and the clutch
Of rabbits caught disease, and mother had to let the old hare go.
You couldn’t really hear the sea from our little house,
Where the couch folded out into a bed where I and my sister slept,
Where the black and white television sat in the corner atop a corn
Hamper, except when there was a tree there for Christmas,
But I still say I could hear the sea, and pretend that when I climbed
The roof after father had left early for Miami, I could watch
The sun put cream into the sky, and swirl up in spindling clouds,
And was the first to see the ice-cream man come for breakfast,
But this is just another attempt, for I never climbed the roof
Of that house.