San Marcos Rum Airlines Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Going down is easy without liquor
Or scars
Where zeppelins never burn above
The low hanging fruit of foibles;
Grandmothers are soft and laying felt
Children on the green board at
Sunday school,
And she is the back room pressing her
Dress, just another saint whose eyes never
Look up:
If she did look up she might teach little
Boys how to fly. I had that happen to me once
By how a stewardess looked at me coming
Down the serviceable aisle,
Her legs were drawn across the thing
Skipping over the earth-
But she doesn’t do this now- She has her
Lines memorized- She is licking her lips
And it is all a treat; and the glass is in my hand.
The rum is from San Marcos which I guess is
A virgin island,
And so I drink to trouble, and to the girls who
Don’t appear to be there anymore;
And to the trips I would have to take to find them,
Though it is already far past midnight:
Whatever they had to tell me, they’ve already told
The audience, and everything is thus undone
And asleep down to earth, young tennis wives basking
With husbands upon a vast tarmac of a romantic
Tarmac where I shouldn’t know how to belong.