Faith In Her Ever Effluvious Dress Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Headless and naked,
The dandelions have begun to blow
Their spores.
No longer virginal, they will become
All but indescribable come winter,
And atheists will say that now they
Are a myth, and pull the lever of
The machine, to see what prizes fall
Out from the golden ring of her science;
But like pricks from nervy spines,
Or the cold shock of the invaded lake,
I should not shake off how I imagined to see
Rows of devout soldiers queuing like ants up
To her phototropic stems,
And in the cavalcade of ceremonial suicides,
Mounted her like toddlers climbing up atop
The four-post bed where they were conceived
In the sun-tossed basin,
And floating away on the gilled parachutes,
Like ghostly bouquets tossed over her shoulder
At the reception as the wind blows;
These then are their secret missions, the
Diminutive espionage of a vanished spring,
They shrink into the lips of waves and join the
City-dwellers in atoms of water dispelled along
The foamy caesuras and crests, measuring
Only beside the dolphin’s fins,
Metropolises of unspoken numbers which twirl
In the chaotic universe without centripetal ellipses;
These I know, from faith in her ever effluvious
Dress.