For Azure Hours Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Replace blue with azure,
Her apathy with sure romance,
Your scars with angelic beauty, and there
You are: You’re a poet now
So sell your lips and tongue for potatoes
And chives-
Drive slowly down streets with girls with
Slender vased legs: Those girls are French-
No matter if they aren’t;
And by nature, they know so many words for love:
Suckle them like flowers. Invite them into your
Car- Tell them it is such and such a propitious
Hour, and they’ll know just by the look in
Your eyes exactly who you are.
Take them to a graveyard, any one, and tell them
Jokes that weep and lactate under the moon,
And they’ll respond with frivolous and unhealthy
foreplay; but it suits you fine as red velvet,
Like the tongues of Catholic dolls, and if that’s
Who they are your eyes are closed;
But don’t take it too seriously, since now nothing
Is exactly empirical.
You can imagine them as generals in the Dolphin’s
Army, spurring you like witch’s spurs, sweating
Deep southern folklore the kind that became popular
During Reconstruction-
Remove their delicates like prayer flags whipped away
From the darnedest Himalayan summits;
And give them silver spurs and love bites like pugilistic
Sirs: Gothic or feral, one or the other- Why now you
Are studied reptilian. You breathe azure fire. Skip all your classes,
Because you are a genius especially in the rains-
Sleep on all your neighbors yards,
Hunt on four legs- Forget to wear school
Colors; and if you ask the alligator he will take you
Across the canal to the other world donned in the brotherly
Shadows;
Or he will devour you- Either way you‘ll get there-
Remove her social instrumentations,
Marriage ornamentations, and swing with
Her on the swings; or just gather by the lake where everyone
Else is baptizing,
Or underneath the desert graveyards where your grandmother
Is walking,
Or floating like the hummingbirds,
And just stare and stare into her azure eyes
For azure hours.