Her Knees' Opal Bowl Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Blind men are shushing in the mount,
The trodden hill covered with spectators
For another event:
The insects of the summer’s frenzy:
With spy glasses watch the gun-metal bulls
Stampede ovals and advertise
With their painted gills:
“I’ve seen these things, ” I say to her,
Over my wounded shoulder and down a ways,
But it is not clear if she’s understood me:
The woman all the young stallions are
Smoking with the penumbra half concealed
In boreal smiles:
Her unfiltered legs crisscross slightly
Like bent, yet perfectly deadly scissors:
Her eyes in a disinfected trance,
Watch the moving billboards for a sign,
An aura of a bright clue, a marriage vow:
“I want to ask you to make love, ” I tell her,
But the sport is roaring like a thunderstorm,
Though sun-dogs are leaping a concentricity
Around their laughing king,
A blue invades the spaceless land,
An infinity of gentle contradictions,
The working class failures who worship half-hazardly;
They would break her, if she wasn’t careful,
Though already there is a someone else’s
Hand on her knees’ opal bowl.