Like An Engine In The Rays Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Another day goes by doing what we’re suppose to do:
A house a car
Out front of so many waves that you can’t see:
Maybe that is what is affecting me,
Giving me tears as real as music boxes
With their delicate gears. I am not old
Enough to be falling apart, but I am not living,
Just turning around in one spot with my arms raised
As if I’m being held up,
As if this isn’t my house I am naked in before the
Rusting dawn, with only my pets looking at me,
My wife and daughter content and fully fed into dreams,
Open electricity:
I undress myself to you like the orchid-flower,
An engagement ring not knowing
What it does, not even having to be trained, and I imagine
Your breasts too: nippled, Grecian sand dollars, vases from
arms raised, like you are trying to
Be a superhero doing good deeds along the gardens;
Thinking that you are floating like a pillow thrown up by
A willful child,
And Ferris wheels and so many haunts we can only stay so
Long in, because they are so expensive and unreal;
But none of the tourists can see you like I perceive.
Even fully in a desert you are my own mirage, and you turn
Yourself around to me and the traffic hasn’t even started. Soon
Busses of school children slip in and out of the sea,
Trying it on, and you seem to smile.
Soon they will all be up, and the sun will be washing the waves
Just out the front door. The mail will come, and the dead will
Raise; but before that happens, I will drink of you what I can,
I will overspill on your expensive energies. Maybe you will
Smile- I don’t know what you will do,
But I will believe in you, running, even after your shadow
Is gone from the breakfasting living,
I see you turning like an engine in the rays.