The Caress Of Jubilant Costumes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Doves in the light of a drowning promises:
In the last light of a truant’s day, anyways: look beautiful as they
Take off behind the transoms of the school
Bus and fly their own ways: back down the curious avenues
Lined by pines and the pearly throats of echinus’s
Past he languid bladders of canals, who’ve had their
Fill of stolen bicycles and cottonmouths:
Returning home to the estuaries of ping pong tables and swimming
Pool,
Basking in the off-putting lights of television for the remainder
Of the cartoons:
They will eat their dinners of fried chicken happily, while another
World will happen right across the canal,
Where the sugarcane burns, and the cats get up on their smarter
Feet to dance
For five dollars with little Mexican girls who have come from
So far away just like the migrations of out of work princesses
So entranced by the misfits on the road who carry them
Anyways- to settle there
Around the ballrooms of cypress, in the cooling husks- penumbrae
Of the lost memories of cicadas- figuring out that is just where
They are going to live: right across the world from us,
Feeling the caress of jubilant costumes we can never own.