The Linear Flights Of Airplanes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now the day has a word and I
Feel hard pressed to travel to you,
Even though after I was done selling fireworks you
Said that we could only be friends,
Even while my cousin who is taller than me was pursuing you
But making little progress:
And then I broke into my own home and laid down with
The feral cats who were not frightened of me
As they ate the grasshoppers and garden snakes:
And there was a glass slipper there underneath the bromeliads
That could not be explained:
And looking up there was a ladder too- taller than a roof,
Hopelessly in a loverless math over the roof of
Antique row
That someone of your lovers had misplaced with his ever
Giving chalice and his surreal antlers:
While in the back seat of my Mercury Tracer still lay the two
Tennis rackets that we’d used to play tennis poorly on
Some Tuesday not long before I took your tiny brown
Body into the waves, Alma- and kissing your
Mouth promised myself to you underneath the linear flights
Of airplanes: trusting me even though everything else was chaos,
And you couldn’t even swim.