Little More Than A Happy Candle Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How rude the cross to lay dreaming in golden
Filigree on Monday
While in less than an hour Alma will be cleaning things in the
Fruiteria:
Alma who must weigh less than one hundred pounds;
And I am up near two hundred:
She was born in Guerro Mexico, and I have never seen how the
Monarch butterflies must have migrated across the shoulders
In the cantinas of her childhood,
But her eyes are as ochre as their sadness:
How rich and stimulating, like the soul penned by big brown
Buttons into the stare of a paper doll:
Strong weather could pick her up and carry her into the makebelieve
Of unicorns:
She loves the Virgin of Guadalupe: she wears her around her neck,
And she cleans the counter while the day leaps over her
Like a boy enamored with her body, like a brown tree wayward
Of its orchard, but happy,
The sun little more than a happy candle basking over her soul.