In The Wastelands Of South Florida Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I burnish words to distract from my impotence,
Like homosexuals go to pet in the zoo:
If I knew a better way I would look you in the eye
While I wrote short fiction long-handed;
And I would not turn away in dénouement,
To make a tragedy; Carefully, I should imprint you
In wayward publications, the way a mother wolf
Teaches her young how to hunt through a feral education:
And use a windlass to crank you up from the sharks,
Who smile like carnivorous dentists, the Precambrian
Utensils who wish to use you as the heroin in their toothy fairy-tale;
But I would whisk you under a tipsy sun;
If we had children, we’d set them out before the waves,
So that they could catalogue the way the sea breathes,
In each motion, where the fish leap like squadrons of
Biplanes; and it would be easier, the way we napped,
And the places that we chose, my nostalgia readily dipped
Into, for it has always swam the dimple of your navel,
Where your mother picked you like a fruit, and held you
In the hospital’s sanitizing light, and drenched you
With those amorous eyes, until they and all the other senses
Knew you well, and sent you spinning into high school
Where our gravities touched like a microcosm of heavenly bodies,
Until you spun me away by your centripetal force never diminished
By all this time and years sweating like octogenarians
Enduring their perilous calisthenics in the wastelands of
South Florida.