The Dragonfly’s Intersections Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Let this play out,
The panhandlers on the corner of
Forest Hill and Jog- I once pulled up and
Dropped in his hand a roll of quarters,
And he blessed me like an unwashed John The Baptist.
Just as I was pulling away, I saw
The screwdriver general trouncing down upon
The object of my homeless philanthropy;
The dominant wino was going to take away
The beer money, I suppose;
Like the pugilism of dizzy waves
With his rabbit-pink eyes bleeding maggot sleep.
Before the early days could wash away into
The confounded strip mall of her crocodile tears:
Neither man didn’t know that this was where I use to
Roam myself- Four years old,
Blond hair and an albino hound name Wolfie
Who went for the throat,
When there was only phalanxes of slash pines,
Blue herons and the smell of Jupiter’s dump when
The winds blew strongly to the south,
Prop planes, pay phones and Donkey Kong at Nola’s
Pizza parlor on the south east corner of the intersection,
And the simplicity of the rattle-snakes’ brittle warning,
Like spare buttons shaken in a jam jar,
The saucer demon eyes in the bright sun;
The ungraffitied nucleus of a burnished soul still warm from
The female’s kiln; Not a haunt in the newborn head,
And legs that swam out past the highways
Of the depressed migrations of snowbirds;
Now I know the pecking order of these diminished
Streets, the lonely fertilities heady in tracts of
Working class song birds:
The grinning phallatios of politicians and their cops in the hurricane,
Budweiser like a shine of easy god rising above the pines,
Her eyes turned away and her body that I once entered;
The woman I love who doesn’t know me,
And the frightened destinations of man on rotten couches
In the junkyard brambles alongside the busy roads,
Dwarfed by the superstructures of other men going nowhere
Very fast: Her eyes are like this in the gloom of
My truck, as I pull through the McDonald’s drive-thru,
On the land my parents use to rent,
Where I had powerful dreams of her chastity’s claret arrivals,
But that was yesterday’s growth spurt;
I get no taller, and now there are only
Ghosts in the concrete’s yellow-eyed desert and where her eyes bloom
The sharp flowers, the dangerous gazes for other men
Far out in the jogging aftermaths, I couldn’t know.