The Very Wish Of My Soul Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Overtures breathing like uncaged bobcats
Now that they are no longer underneath roofs, and the
Walls are short enough to leap:
Long tongued, hyperventilating like the colonnades
Of industry where too much gas has been spilled
From lip to lip,
Like butterflies gossiping, trying to create the chaos that
Will end them up in Disney World,
As it got me here- so next door to my next and final muse,
With the limestone and coquina underneath our
Little pattering feet,
And the ghosts evaporated up into the air like the saltlick
Riming the underbellies of airplanes;
And I have the sneaking suspicion that I live next door
To a stewardess, because she is hardly ever home
To smell the jasmine that works its perfumes in the night,
Like the delicate ethereal fingers of lovers who were
Once here, and the duel mouths that their memory still feeds
The enjambments of odor through which the balmy nights proceed;
And I only think of her, like a curtained wish, a star yet
Discovered, as the busses turn around- and all of the metamorphosis
Gathers to see the first lights of my Alma, the very wish of my soul.