For A Little Ways Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There were dragonflies and there
Were swingsets:
And at one time they had one all over the other:
And the helicopters were
Approaching- the first one a phosphorous
Yellow,
The second one as red as periodic tear:
And I took Alma to the
Playground,
And made my love to her, sincere: but she was just
An echo then:
Turning around, coital, abstract:
Her brown body lifted off the earth and into the
Waves where I carried her,
When she couldn’t even swim: her two children
Drowning around her,
Like hapless mermaids: and when I watched her leaving
Me everyday from work,
It was like an entire forest fire drowning higher
Up on the higher ledges,
Where the airplanes can hardly even fly: and it has become
More distant from now until then,
And her body is an abstraction from my pain:
Like a painted butterfly drifted off into the severe forest of
A Civil War Spain:
Rattled with snake bites, and shot through with bullet holes:
She arrives one last time, kissing the pigeon holes of
Angels like the most intrepid of kites:
And then she goes away, back into the rest stop of his
Brown armpits: she resides in the nests to which were
Born her first and last children:
And with her eyes closed, for a little ways: she sings to me:
Or I think that she must, anyways.