Halfway Up The Mountain Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am not doing it right now, not hitting it home:
I haven’t traveled out much,
I haven’t even been to town- I just saw one cloud
Halfway up the mountain that got me excited
About you, and otherwise turned me on:
And the cowboys came down pin wheeling their
Horses across the steep esplanade
And I held my dogs close to me like two daughters in
The yellow shade,
And they tipped their hats to me, and some twirled
Their guns,
And on the summit they’d planted a miniscule tattered
American flag,
Which made me dream of you,
And I laid half naked under the watch tower,
Pretty sure that there would be no forest fires, because
The trees were getting naked-
And the entire hemisphere wore the most cerulean of hats
And it made me thing of you,
And made me otherwise excited- I was real ashamed
That I made no sacrifice,
Being only a single father and rather poor,
Always having to take a few nips now to get anything out,
And I rippled quite consumptive in the sun shower
And the virulent wildflowers who were closing shop-
I remembered I only saw you once through all of college,
And the airplanes leapt like frogs
And I wept and got on all fours and picked wild strawberries,
But they were hardly enough,
And the other tourists laughed,
All of which, you know, made me think of you….