Sleeping Beauties Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The more beautiful woman they are,
The less they could care about my job:
That I haven’t been published in
The Atlantic Monthly,
Or that I can’t see the ocean from where
I live-
The better they look in perky angora,
The twin mammalian confections where
Rome was founded,
The more likely they are to go to the movies
Alone,
Whose beautiful eyes kill like Superman,
Who only feel lonesome and vulnerable when
At the beach underneath the watchtowers
Sporting Herculean life-guards;
And it doesn’t matter that in a few words
I could paint their naked bodies orange,
From tit to toe, bloom them an orchard,
Use my tongue to paint in the highways
And stamp the landing pads:
That I could hold up entire cities and lead them through
Each summer until the flowers wilt and they slept
In voyeuristic tombs down past the diamond minds
In little sweltering glades
Where seven or so alligators croaked and ululated;
That I could tear up entire novels dedicated to the
Perfect indentation of their upper lip,
Or that I live my life alone just for them sweltering
With my dogs well past midnight while the working
Traffic never quits:
And I put down needful things like a grocery list
Every ebony part of them included,
Girls in shopping malls and drive-thru windows,
Secretaries, swinging with lovely hips
Like censers amusing themselves behind stained glass,
And the little things they only pretend to know
In the quiet foreplays for holidays just for them;
And all this panting just to get to the bottom floor
At the end of our shifts,
And she doesn’t even wait, or reconsider,
But leaves straight off to get naked and pose
In a giant glass of blushing Chablis,
Or maybe to smoke alone in a sepia wonderland
With the other nocturnal creatures well-
After the motorboats and weekend professors have
Gone to bed off the lake,
And she has nothing else to say about it,
Her eyes so wonderfully apathetic and so far away.