Gladiolas Of A Wider Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I can listen to the wind for hours and it never
Haunts me;
It is soft and careless as a mother drinking in her rays;
Busting like a hound dog or a retarded gumshoe
Through the lees of slash pine trees:
And the joggers fall through it like stick-legged demons,
And when they cut their knees and taste
Their wounds, they remember things that now live swooning
Like fattened doves into other houses:
In strange boxes which throb with warmth, like wombs
Of whales in furnaces,
And the creatures across the earth move in similar details;
And I think all of this is nice, the zoetrope of the next day’s
Casual mammals,
Floating like in a tub of plastic trinkets that the greatest
Harlot of them all enjoys herself,
Dabbing her pits like Siamese orchards: How she positions us,
And how we enjoy our defeats of victory anyways-
Rising up and shooting down according to her drunken will,
Resurrected, mouthing off, and accumulating in our fraternities
As she bathes, nippled, gladiolas of a larger world until she
Rises nude for an even greater sort of game,
Leaving us emptied of her will.