To Make Her Mine Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Looking up all holidays across the napes of
Censual trees: you could say I’ve seen my mother here,
But I disbelieve:
The muse is elusive, brown bodied in the trackless skree,
Brushing the borderlines that were never drawn:
She came up lactating all of the calendars and golds from
Mexico,
And now this has become my sport, to echo up the shadows
Of her unglamorous caves, all the passes that she has
Survived from, nicking her feet too across the switchbacks
Of alligators and rattlesnakes
To arrive here and without fanfare in the pinprick of our
America: she says that by the wells of her ancestry,
It is all that they ever talk about:
But when they get here, to my old neighborhood, they find out
It is not so much:
But she still kisses my mouth before or after closing time,
And she practices to become a citizen: my Alma,
Brownly damseled, she wishes that I would not write about her
So much: but I am like a caged animal,
And this is my lunch- and so I must awaken to her on time,
And kiss and growl and caracole her lovely instruments in the
Insatiable hopes to make her mine.