For A Little While Poem by Robert Rorabeck

On the loose though exhausted, what would you
Do in the backyard shirtless all afternoon, remembering
The bottle rockets that you wasted-
Or the girls that you left behind to learn math in school-
There in that open habitat that your mother mowed
Shoeless on the weekends,
The ants riled up to see their gods birthday cake in the
Green steak knives of the palmettos-
Or the blue insects like Christmas toys, walking up the
Joints in a river of trees,
While the ghost of the girl you loved floats in a canoe
Aimlessly:
There she goes, as the sugar canes burn her motifs-
She seems to have drifted down from Tallahassee while
The forest fires were still all burning around Disney
World- and some Mexican girl
Was lost in the Dry Tortugas, crying for her sisters that
You supposed you ate breakfast with yesterday-
And she leaves to take her daughter up to her husband
Through the orange fields and dunes- and they
Are even making love right now fallen brown skinned
In an gossiping apiary, even the while college
Students flood their campuses- and the pain lingers
For a little while.