The Breeze Cuffs Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Death begins like this, and all imperfections empty,
As the toilet flushes underneath the naked light bulb
Far out on the naked prairie: Thus, I should not
Begin at all. I should not walk high in the snow to see my lover,
To carve chunks off us to feed the bussed in wolves;
Stain on the white sheet made by god, for his dinner or for what;
I could lay out my wrist, begin that scar- She would laugh,
Not knowing what it was: A change, a goddess in any outfit.
She has one for each day of the year, a designer cocoon,
A closet. She is metamorphosis.
I am immobile, and I am rust: more and more,
And I had thought I had submitted, that I had come down
With my dogs, and driven off her, went home and had dinner,
Got fat and well educated from reading my books by the fire;
I had thought that my relatives understood where to bury me,
Where the gun was in its drawer where I needed it,
And the whiskey: Thus I had lined out the final love letter,
Used up the ink of the heliotrope spore: Cast downwards those
Things that failed me, the things I couldn’t get into: But I am not
Down at all, and it is such a night that one needs a fire, needs
A soul; but I do not have it if it is not already out,
and my dogs’ howls are joined by
The bristling snouts of the bussed in wolves, so what should they say
When they poke me on the slab? That I was voiceless because they
Ate my box, and that I shouldn’t have begun at all, because Death begins
Like this, taking little steps toward the innocent whore;
And I began like this, little cuts of the wrist; and now I am as stone is
Underneath the bus, underneath the floor, thinking of her in little cuts
A little more; the bull weevil awaiting chrysalis, the newborn waiting
For his muff, the child for its whore,
And will be even as the yard grows high up from the floor;
This I sing as the breeze cuffs, and will cuff for evermore.