High On Our Enamored Perfumes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I gave you a book of Borges today,
As I gazed at you like a fox from the water cooler:
What a shame that I have forgotten all of my Latin,
And I only know bastardized Spanish:
The book I wrote when I was twenty four, you held in your soft
Brown hands when you came over
And made me promise not to tell anyone that you’d
Come over;
And then we rolled around on the floor, and you said you were
Mad at me when you were leaving;
But your eyes filled the sky, and from my bedroom window
The fishtail palms weep upwards to you; they are green and emolliate
And I have seen fiery green lizards dancing on their limbs:
They are of your favorite colors, Alma:
And we ate your birthday cake yesterday: And I drove my teacher’s
Car by your house tonight while he was in Philadelphia,
And then I went to your church and had a look around,
And Miguelito stole a gardenia’s bloom as we laughed all the way home,
High on our enamored perfumes.