The Entire World Sleeps Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Getting drunk,
And I don’t remember a lick of Latin:
Just her face perfect across the way,
Like a constant dream of a house I
Have with her with ivory clasped
On the red bricks,
Up the hill from a quiet park,
A guilty lake:
I listen to flamenco, and try not to say
Her name,
And finish off the glass of cheap rum.
Now that we have a new president,
The liberals wet their panties,
And say it will be Camelot,
But Bukowski is still a scarred corpse
Who is so sober its frightening:
And she doesn’t want me anymore,
Not often,
And my fingers are yet tap-dancing,
Like water-spiders controlled by a storm cloud
Who drinks its rum and contemplates
Arousals: Sex? Not for a couple years,
And yet she remains,
Emblematic of the personifications of nature,
A dryad I knew who loved her dogs,
And forgot how to swim in the pools of her
Mother, and her sororities:
I give this to her, as I give all things,
Until I have nothing left to present to her,
What a scarred bouquet tossed
Like a sad dream against her window as she
Makes love to adolescent super-heroes:
If she still reads these, then she knows I love her,
But she is too insouciant to care:
She takes her breakfast with maple syrup and
Cigarettes, and it took me a couple readings
To come up with cigarettes, and even now
Better writers are making better sense in Maine,
And my breath now smells like the privateers of
The 16th century, but I have two dogs who love
Me, who will both be dead within fifteen years,
And yet I will not forget them while
I still have breath,
And the extemporaneous desire to write you
Poetry:
Dear God, she is so far away, and she doesn’t
Care, but that is how it should be,
And even now my great uncle seeds a crop of corn
Which will be harvested next year in Michigan:
He has never forgotten my birthday,
And I love you, Erin,
And that is all there is,
And the moon is almost full, and I have a book
Published, and nothing else to do, but to move against
You in other dysfunctional ways of vagrancy:
I may move to Saint Louis next year, and hold a note
For the length of a degree, and you will never hear,
But I would like to take you down into the bottom
Redness of the Grand Canyon and peruse your neck
With the folklore of extinct Indians
Who scavenged naked and ate the plums off of
Cactuses along the trails they made,
Before my desire for your gold made them extinct:
And can’t you see how beautiful it is,
Even in your little city, how I have carved your name in
Uncertain stone, and given my name rightly, I
Am a conquistador, and your lips such a blessing,
You would never know,
And so I honor you quietly in the diminutive ways I know
From this un translated basement,
While my dogs sleep, or for what it matters,
The entire world sleeps.