West Again Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How does it happen? This swift speculation, come to me.
Like mercury, I draw you. Is it not in my blood;
Is the harpsichord not being played down against the river,
For the new constructions: And my wife? No, don’t tell me
Where she has gone, or where the grounds fold upward wanting
Storm. Eventually they go so far north they get what they deserve:
They cannot breathe, and there is the moon she wants; she
Stands on her tiptoes and offers up a muddled breast. I say,
I have seen it many times where she hopes to enfold beyond the
Tattering of this frontier. At her feet there is no longer prairie,
Nor miner’s print, no substance empirical to man: She wishes
To escape? Hah, for I tell you, my interest, she is a dance-hall girl
Of the finest sort, and I’ve swiftly taken her from closer to the
Pacific, and dropped her many paces east, until it is mostly west again
where there is yet paint on the buildings;
And the sawing continues from breakfast to dinner, the hard-heads patter the nails by the seconds, with preachers uncorked; And it has confounded her,
and that is all. She has yet to make money,
But there will be time, and good earnings, and I expect she will settle
Still and come back down and do those things finely shown up on
The stage we build for her, as we expect her to, those things that once
Settled she knows how to perform, and I have seen her do many
Times before, over many hills:
She will perform her stuff: That is why I married her, and because they call her Carmine Ridiculous;
It is rumored she killed her father, and that is her picture on the poster hung beside the door: Its ten cents to see her, but if you wait until tomorrow
I will only charge you five. If you are a good climber,
I wont have any choice to but let you get a good look at her tonight
For free. Either way,
She will make us rich, once she comes down, for everything must settle
Into its place, even like the gold they are taking out of the riverbed.