Speckled Bellies Of Leaping Aeroplanes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tonight there are people on airplanes over
The ocean, and men who stay up all night long
In emptied shopping malls, and endless wayward traffic,
And children who will never go home:

Near the swaybacked caesuras in a little house, they kiss and
Penetrate, the girl I once laid on the shore
Of the ocean where the old viaduct walked into
The teal waves musselled and worn,
Where we used to smoke exeunting 7th period
History. My oldsmobile was cherry red and leaked
Fumes out the backseat, a cheap high,
And where the waves didn’t touch there were
Burrows of swashbuckling crabs;

I pretended one
Was Jordan’s sister, all speckled and clean the
Way she used to sunbathe near the family’s pool,
The collie nuzzling up to her warm breasts, like
Vanilla muffins under a turquoise bikini,
And I’d watch her after playing videogames, salivating
As if on saltwater taffy. I’d stay up on school nights
And watch anime at 4 am, hide in the Florida holly
Until the bus crawled by and made a circle around
The wildlife preserve, ride my Huffy back to the
Five acres, and watch a Bruce Lee movie
Until my dreams resumed;

My father’s horse
Was struck by lightning, a month after I finished selling
Fireworks with Bill Tulk, who used to ride bulls,
And now he is losing his house, and his wife is named
Chris, and he was arrested and thrown in jail for
A drunken evening bobbing in Gainesville while I
Rode under the palms to my classes, and despised the
Feminist professor for insulting Holden Caufield;

Even after I graduated, I got drunk and passed out beside
The library and dreamed that I had written books
And were now in there like eggs in a hen house, and
We cracked them open and ate them salted and with
Hot sauce,
And afterwards we’d kiss, our lips like mollusks
Sticky from the undercooked yoke,

so when my mother cries while fixing
Peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches,
weeping that there is nothing else to eat and my
Poetry should be but the enjambment of logs spilling
Into the mouth of a vague river, mumbling, I can only say
To her to close her eyes, and at night on the roof
She can learn kung-fu and float from tree-top to tree-top,
Should she learn to scissor her legs blissfully, and
Swing her arms like cranes, and from those
Boughs laugh and practice her own style of martial
Arts, and look up to the speckled bellies of leaping
Aeroplanes.