Hieroglyphics Of Our Nostalgias Poem by Robert Rorabeck

As a child, I dreamed of produce:
Radishes and cabbages blooming prodigiously,
And rabbits enjoying just
As richly as a young boy might pornography:

It was my parents' business,
The selling of the growing of things, the coming up of the world,
And it took us to the very ends of the earth:
Millions of dollars of ears of corn,
To where the lawyers and the doctors lived,
Swaybacked near where
The tortoises with the diamond shells basked.
And where we didn't belong:

Here, the sun shot up and spumed over
The burning golden sugar cane fields- where the upper middle
Classes flocked such as golden herons to the schools with
The good ratings:

Here, the sun raked the earth with its rays,
And the greenness increased: it was easy enough to pick it
From our back yards, in the orange fields,
Choirs elaborating in battalions of sunlight;

Things that we could tell our tiny sons in spots of daydreams,
And look back on as hieroglyphics of our nostalgias:
A tangible void usurped from the mestizos, and the ancestors
Of cenotaphs:

We drove our cars across their graveyards everyday:
And in front of our eyes there were billboards, and billboards
Of a million dazzling things,
And places to park our cars so they couldn't move:
And an organization that we were sure to belong in,

In the schoolyards, noises rich with trumpets,
And herons flocking to the metamorphosis of alligators-
A long line of observers, and school kids like monarch butterflies
Migrating in yellow school busses:

a rich canopy that smokes with the abscesses of a magician's
Fire:
A mirage put upon the flesh of boys playing in the sand:
Hands of gossiping angels trying to dress them up in dinner attire:
And girls stretching as the shadows do,
Wringing the necks of mailboxes at crepuscule:

Distending into parks and playgrounds,
Causing mirages far beyond the places where we really lived.