Edison's Thievery Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Let us pinch the cheeks of dearies,
And go out into the yard in the light they invented
Just last century,
The mowed and fertile plane,
The miniscule and microcosmic all down below,
Curling and multi-legged in the grass.
Across the street, the neighbor has his expensive
Car all waxed and cherished glean,
And the girl I once slept with and
Moved into many times, how she rows:
She lives there too, an aphrodisiac of capital,
A curling iron unplugged in the backyard patio
Where the pool stays lighted and cleaned; She swims
Back and forth, pretending that she is pure,
Still the daughter of her parents, and yet there are weeds
Beautifully accentuated by Edison’s thievery,
The brick-laying thugs smoking her....

These truant fingers skip over this like pollination;
They no longer move through her secular pubis,
Or twiddle in a thimble full of her cottaged quim.
For certainly scarred, they are still the cicadas on the brim,
Sloughing off of themselves, the luxury of metamorphosis
Whispered in the ear of a dandelion before she spores:
This is how they go away, and this how they remain,
The patterns the tide leaves on the beach, or on my temples,
Throbbing as they watch pieces of vampiric angels
Unclothe and bathe immortally in the open and concrete showers
Their tan-lines hauntingly androgynous.....

These conquerors of better sport farted through an education,
Made love to phallic pestilence, were married in a mopped
Apartment store: Look at her going up the poor mathematics of an
Escalator, and coming down with defining sacrifices, Now
How the trimmed grass whispers around the little feet of the house,
How the buds come out and flaunt clitorises for the wet blue wasps,
The stinging quips of rain;
And the luxury of the sea, salt all over their bodies, and
The hurricanes rife with unruly children, like truants kicking
Feet on the swing-set outside the stained-glass where
The Catholic’s choir sings,
And after all the redded hymns, back under the humid pine trees,
He opens the door for her, though her dress is ripped and her
Eyes away;
She goes in politely, her lips bruised,
Her hymen a torn curtain of a forgotten play,
And they move like gangsters to their plotted psalm:
He to watch gulf all afternoon, her to take her sister’s
Medicated phone-call,

I watch the ants move in the grass.
They have found a whisper and are carrying it away
To their queen.