Like A Minnow Blushing In The Nylon Mask Of Your Tawny Calf Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What I am doing is putting on for you
These shy speckles,
And swimming on through your windshield,
Flashing my broadside;
Pretending to smile, if fish could smile,
If that is what I truly am, or just a story getting
Bigger with each reincarnation of its telling
From grandfather to father to son,
After wars are over and the weather has retreated,
And the horses have come back out stiffed hoofed from
The dripping forests
To begin amassing once more out into the open;
This is where I go, down slipping imperfectly fleshed
In the swift threads that are melting off the seasons,
Like another sort of metamorphosis,
The way a butterfly must disrobe from chrysalis,
Or any form of poetry disembarked from its birthing woods.
I come unspeaking dripping down the muddy slopes,
Past the micas of collecting estuaries,
Past the old tire swing, and the secret haunts of twin
Lovers,
Past where the lightning scarred the trunk,
And where the miners rest, or any other sort of allusions,
Either in the Adirondacks or the red clay and maize of
Countries I have never truly been:
I come slipping down to you dry mouthed with all these words
Hoping that I will be caught up inside of you,
And feed you, and thus come to nourish you, to know
The requirements of your body,
And thus come into the fulfillment of my task cease in my being,
But a remembrance you sometimes recall,
Walking to and from your classes, causing light to be more
Beautiful through the contrast of the body of your presence-
What I was always meant to be,
Clapping your echoes, I hope to carry on in each of your steps,
Like a minnow blushing in the nylon mask of your
Tawny calf.