For Us To Hear Poem by Robert Rorabeck

When I go to China
I don’t know so many poems: foreigner,
My tongue is cut out
But I find a wife who speaks to me in
Fifteen dollar hotels as we
Try to find a child in
Shanghai—over the land owned by the
Government—they are supposed to be
Her own people:
She loses her virginity:
Afterwards, she makes me wear sandals
To go out and find the means
To collect all of the golden eggs.
And above the
Tenements: there are the heavens that the
Dragons come down
From:
She calls me a lucky man,
As we shiver like strings on instruments
In the cold from this world
I have entered buried underneath the earth:
All of the riches of
The ancestors,
Ghosts that busy us inside cabs—
As we pass through the overpasses of beaming
Shells,
Making love in their absences,
Pretending to listen to the architectures of
Waves
Building and destroying deliberately too far
Away for us to hear.