The Glories Of Your Tongue Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now is all in the skinny green of arrows shot
Above the prairies of harmless orchards:
Now is all of this, like the far away singing of my mother
Pressed like a hopeless romantic to my father’s
Breast:
While I am now all right hear, all collected underneath the gyrations of
The birds and the sea:
And I cannot even get a teaching job, because I am so nervous,
That I belong inside another country;
And I want your flag tattooed on my chest, and beneath that the
Hallucinations of the frontera that you had to cross:
And I want to be with you, Alma, even if it means going without
Breathing and without water:
I want to be a single wish of your witchcraft; and I want your body
Strung across me like a psalm,
Like a healing wound, while all of the actors portray the things that
Cannot exist into a theatre that can no longer be real:
While the visions come like angels, like airplanes
Above the amusement parks of your russet elements;
Your body folding against the dryer of my beating heart like
Clothes cling to the sun, like grapes becoming obese on the vine;
As I swear by these lines, as my kiss answers the glories of your tongues.