Exactly What She Does To Me Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Deep at night, somnambulating,
My scrotum tucks in like a shivering terrapin:
It feels like an icebox cupped in the long-nailed
Feeling of a highland banshee;
And when she kisses me, this dreadfully tattered
Woman of the far north country,
It is like I cannot breathe, and so hang from the
Long shadowed neck of the deep south lynching
Tree;
It is like I am that ancestral ash shed from a
Cigarette’s cherry by a snaky teenage truant swinging
Like a leggy black-nailed serpent along the moony
Shadows of some ancestral maple tree:
This is how she places me, an entire colony of greedy
Ants feeding on a dove’s flightless cadaver,
An airplane falling silently like a stone into the awaiting
Sea, and I am too lonely to gather, so easily she
Breaks me like a windmill’s blades tasting the salt from
The windcut sea- She winnows me,
And every night by that hour of her name she encases me
In the dark resurrection of her habitual sensory:
I jog around her for seven miles, like seven times, like a spell
While the rest of the world drifts off like a poorly crowned
Paper-ship in a spilling gutter. I can hear her laughter
Long after her drinking games are over. She doesn’t
Even know that she does it-
What she does to me, what suicide inspires in me,
A woman who doesn’t know my name, her legs spilling like
Shaven ways of kneed and opal tributary; and when it is over, and
I am gone, but an empty space ready for viewing, then she
Awakens and travels on, filled with the gyrating pinwheels
Of blissful energy she has consumed of me;
Her bosom then too like sweet burial mounts topped with
Sand dollars and those with cherries, just a final allusion of
Exactly what she does to me.