Cake Delivery Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Rainbows of ski-lifts looking into her eyes,
While all of my nights are alone
Learning how to spell in the overgrown grass,
And the pornographies of misspent fireworks
Beside the canal,
While the teal, teal heron eggs are cracking:
The sugarcane is burning,
And we look up together, the sugarcanes burning
In a truancy of a shadows-
Mailboxes whose lips are unpainted, and the day
Goes like this,
Rising over the limestone, and the birds who lay
Here,
While the carnivals turn around and around,
Repeating the fallacies of superheroes-
Then we sell Christmas trees into the dust, and in
The night we collect marbles
With our hands in our pockets in our bedrooms:
The moon arises, and the grapes
Grow pregnant, with the foxes beneath them:
Their fathers, braying, and licking their own coats,
To clean off the cockleburs,
And to remove any of the tears that may have been
Placed there by the fieldtrips that sweat off our tomorrows,
And burn off our little yards of tomorrows,
While the wives that we once hoped to know kneel
In our carports to the kisses of sad toads,
And kneading their hands into origami over the seals
Of frogs in the rusting rebars of the rains,
And pray, and pray.