The Washbasins Of Mandevilla Poem by Robert Rorabeck

On loan from the washbasins of mandevilla,
My scars make no pronunciations of their own:
They are the love letters to the death
And blind who fall asleep through their troubles
In an overgrown nest in the woods,
Where the kine startle them awake into darkness
From the glorious crossbeams they summoned behind
Their floating eyes-
That is where Alma lives and bakes bread on hot flat
Rocks down in the dry creek beds, where she kisses
And sings to rattlesnakes on their
Lips,
And tosses witchcraft into the empty cradles now
That her children have crossed the roads into the frontier,
Where her mother spent a month knitting and crying out
Alma’s name,
Like a pinprick of a rosary’s perfume in a homeopathic
Boudoir she wears around her neck-
The very same diminutive challis she used to win me over,
And to send my ticking spirit over the homes with no roofs,
To create a penumbra for a terrapin,
And to let the sun drip around her as she languorously played,
Heating up and resurrecting things for me to believe in.