Joel Chandler Harris Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Manic, and psalms now-
I’ve wanted to live forever in the somber
Utopias that housewives covet,
The neat kitchens and prim sheets,
The secret lines sniffed beside the
Supermarket bouquets beside the crenulated
Swimming pools in the early afternoons
And soap operas, topless, and or whenever as needed;
But I find myself moving to the other side,
To the rainy borders gnawed at by thorns
The barbed-wire grown into weary jaw-bones,
Wired shut to the whisperings of deceased mothers
And all their lot, the fairy-tales of n*ggers
Escaped in the briars to mend the bloody fingers
The spiders up the spigot of Mary’s cotton gin,
The mouse is turning the wheels of the abandon
Amusements, the convalesced parades along the old
Sea-shell highways of the motionless fossil sea-
All that priceless pain, cabinets of miss assessed worth,
the bottomless envy:

the
Blue button eyes that stare out at windows to
Watch her practice cheers, the stuffed hands that
Must not ever wonder what it would feel like to
Come alive and caress the perfect innocence
Of each tawny river of those expressive legs,
Roman candles, batons- silver tasseled,
All the exclamations of her excessive spring
Which must fade before the self conscious stutters,
Lips sewn shut must wait passively velveteen,
Soft forgotten, a teenage childhood that can not thwart
The more adult sting, the deadly scorpions of the wider
Desert whose poison barbs bare children,
Entire households hallucination that afternoon,
Jobs, and stations, and cars which give mature purpose
To her earlier explanations now have to shave
Though before they leapt around all afternoon with
The ice-cream trucks and special patriotisms after school;

But it is the dinner hour and the wolf is already in-
In fact she’s taken his name, his root, but really, Robert,
What was a stuffed toy ever to say to such muse’s perfection?