The Twilight Basket Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Emptied bottles of otherwise genii wishes,
And lifting my lips to the heavens all fretted by the
Passing of airplanes:
The leaping of scams above that suburbia where
The midgets hide in the palmettos up the bank to which
I’ve floated too; and it is easiest to prove these things
When I am alone and drinking;
And otherwise no one: Only that the night is as celestial as
A firework bought on the cheep, and in its frenzy as many opulences,
But finally settles down from its pinwheels and stops
Hypnotizing and the housewives come out into their
Yards,
And feel by their barefootedness the grass that the Mexicans have
Mowed for them on the cheep;
And nothing else has to move: not the alligators as calm in the
Canal as bugles eager for the bugler’s lips;
And every day in this strangely mollified frontera, the butterflies
Come and speak through the little angels of death:
Speak of the ribcages of the panthers who don’t live here anymore,
Speak through the bars of a cell of a soul, of my Alma,
And all of the ways I have been defeated, like weeds growing up
Again through the very grasses who will continue
Multiplying like the pornography inside the junked cars
Underneath the rootless fornications of the Australian pines
Across the street; only knowing that I did it under the
Same moon for Alma, again,
Swearing to her that I wanted to know her for as long as I could
Like,
Like an otter slipping out of a creak to kiss a maiden all giddy on
Her wedding day,
Or to kiss that very snake who caused the day and the twilight basket
Into which all of men and all of my grandfathers perpetually are
Falling.