Before She Could Fall In Love Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She’ll breast feed and we’ll
Finish off the bottle-
The world will tilt a little,
But nothing more than it does,
And we’ll end up at the dead ends
With the signs that tell us so,
The weeds and smoked engines,
The working girls like slave fairy-tales,
Uncle Remus with his cane pole
Casting for blue gills;
She’ll live in a blindingly rich house,
Attended by waves of light
That will do a dance from room to room
To the cadences of money reports
And the gurgling of richly milked fountains
Harrumphing off her teats,
Crenellating each mastiff areola the way
Minerals slobber down stalactites in the
Still fertile Carlsbad Caverns,
Beautiful Venus flytraps of tourism off the
Crisp highways of New Mexico;
And we’ll end up somewhere further away
In the mountains of inebriate Navajo
Teeth aching from the poisons used to ferment
Our souls dreaming of that self-sustained woman
Glowing with the incandescence of a deep sea
Ballroom, always attended by the behemoths of
Said grandeurs, having no need for the more
Airy sorority of heavens to which we sacrifice
So much infertile howls, and unconceived
Ululations drunk in midnight parks,
Station wagons crumpled softly into nearby trees,
Horns bleating while she fixes plates of
Immaculate beef; Remembering the bleating of
Such slaughter, her blood mixing in the creams,
How much material must we steal to fill up
The sinkholes of compromised limestone
To keep on the affluent palliation,
While we cry outdoors in rainy crèches of palmettos,
The first born ba$tards who had her virginity
Only to be abandoned to the doorsteps of a feral
Church,
Wounded at the far corner of her neighborhood
Before she could fall in love with our first word.