Like A Bleeding Painting Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The cubby holes lay open-mouthed until they
Are filled with the shed skins of children,
Like in a chrome world suddenly decorated for Christmas;
And it is quite beautiful, to pay the meter, and spend one’s
Life open throated, watching a world bedecked by the sea
That seems to be burning off its whimsies into the sky:
How the palmettos and all of their cousins speak in the winds
Behind me,
All the unchosen avenues branching away: That life is a vineyard
Of pulsing needs and shooting pulsars,
While the engines rev, and the kittens purr; and there might
Have been a time that she would have laid down beside me,
Like the ocean burning into the sky, like a bleeding painting strung
Out before where I had parked my car.