El Canto Palido Por Mi Primo Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tinhorn cufflinks and pale alligator boots tapered to a point,
And Marteen is ready to return to his second wife in Mexico- Only
Yesterday, I stopped for him to get a fifth of southern comfort whiskey
At the Old Red Barn in Sanders, AZ, and he talked all the way home
With a language as insouciant as his whistling on
The standard bred horse ranch where is his precarious employ,

But he cannot find his visa, and his shirt and pants match like rich
Cadmium, and he is ready to go with all his worldly goods stacked like
A metal and wood hive on the back of his truck which sings Mexican cantos
Laid down the way ghosts move from the little town of White Rock,

And sometimes I feel that my words should move like Robert Frosts’,
And that when I too grow old that I should look for the apertures of my photos
In my books spined in the color of golden wasps who no longer exist,
Slightly askance with my homily visage, my eyes the sort of somnambulists
Walking through the broken gates of old corals in the twilight smudges,

But such whimsy is my condition, and I do not know how to dance,
And Marteen with the lanky frame which no longer exists on the East Coast,
Has a better chance with the made of Carmens sunbathing their spotlights in Miami,
And this brittle careen which I do to touch the pale whiskers of unnoticed flesh
Is but a performance that anyone might try, for in words to live but a day longer
Is all there is to be hoped for.