Shore Drive Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The art is mishandled and led down into the sea.
Tourism’s fat lips hang over the water like a flatulent cloud,
Chewing up tuna, blowing man-o-war.
They are buying so many things, where the land shifts and
The children line up around the sleepy tortoises drunk
Off wine like they were in the middle of a park
Waiting their turn for the merry-go-round.
The sun chips away, exposing such sins like a muckraker
In slicks with a bucket at low tide: What is he digging up?
What words should I know to put there in his pail,
To satisfy the onlookers, or the mermaids bathing and
Doing delicate laundries (petticoats and braziers) in
The effervescing foliage of the surf:
I want to move here and winnow with the palmetto’s shadows
Through dawn, and eat what food I can steal,
To trickle this roe down to my heart and coat it like spilling ink
From an inebriate sailor’s runny tattoo,
And dream of so many movie girls who have forgotten me,
Who are pregnant and restaurateurs- who know so much
About wine, and where to kiss a leading man; but here, once settled,
To recognize the constant changing battles in the front yards,
The immigrants and ghosts and fire-ants
who’ve swashbuckled through history
Lounging in a carport that I own, and yachts and schooners further
Out on the blue deck practicing for the ballet: Surely, she doesn’t
Love me, but here there is so much bright sorrow that it perpetuates
Itself: I will drive there and let the shady spots freckle with
My scars; it will be on my birthday, and I will be reborn so far away
From her that it doesn’t really matter that
She will make pilgrimages to see me then, even though she is
Blind. Out in the waves she is a good kisser, and she has an
Inclination to change her mind,
While the tourists hang like storm clouds with red-eyed lobster
Traps looking down from their enraptured dinners, they see us make
Love; and they pay with sanddollars, and still they say that they don’t understand.