Betting On Her Races Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Then I will laugh at the old voices
Who seem to be coming out of
The radios in the basins of the mountains-
To the tourists, they are just the old heat
Of elbows or birds that once ate
Lunch around them, singing into their eyes
As if echoes of their own voices;
But now lighted out, spent from cars like
The off-giving love of gasoline,
To settle near the nipples of angelic cul-de-sacs,
To give aspens hallucinations,
Making them disrobe- that love is unspeakable
And ill rendered,
But beneath there is perfectly collected another
Gunfight- all the loud hurrahs of mom and
Pop heroes going out on the town again,
Or taking their ill perceived children
To another penny arcade- to buy whatever souvenirs
They have, or to ride the narrow gauge railroads-
When high over their shoulders,
Feral and Mongoloid,
Nubile headlines spilling from the cracked lips of
Geodes fingerprinted by grizzly bears,
And angels fully unclothed in sport, tossing liquid
Coins in each others hearts,
As the streams are running
Down her naked body,
Giving her throes, betting on her races.