The Earlier Memories Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Perfume for seahorses is a way of starting off:
A little tear building into an oceanâ€"peony for a ghost
Refusing to come to its absolute conclusionâ€"
Up in the soft and greasy foothills and red clay, bats
Are nestingâ€"great poets are being shot
Underneath olive leaves like oxymoronsâ€"The moon
Catches all of the weeping that she can and divides
Them until she is full: Beneath her, the tents for
Spilling fireworks are rising,
And the buses are turning around in a chorus of chartreus
Butterfliesâ€"
There is a better art than mine in the soft bosom of a
Cul-de-sac she is too busy at obtainingâ€"birth stones
Around her neckâ€"most everything about her is already
Clinging to somethingâ€"monuments of her body,
Tourists are making her childrenâ€"but in the ways I have
Found her there is no hidingâ€"illuminate daydreams,
Across the diminutive parks of sand-castles and
Oleanders she comes glidingâ€"until
Lit up in a tree, the wayward kites she coaxes, as they
Tumble beside her and the clothes she is dryingâ€"
As the rains remember other soft children beside the
Dim carport beside the earlier memories of which they
Are falling.