Many Fish Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She is outside.
Enjoying the world, her pupils
Extend, like lions at the feast,
Red, red lipped in the tall, tall grasses;
What is she doing?
I cannot say, but enjoying the
Well thought out words of patrons and bribes,
Words I could hardly encapsulate in my
$.25 cent dreams:
Words that scrawl luxuriously through backyards
And bar rooms,
And return her to her childhood when she
Didn’t have to shave her legs,
Nor paint her lips,
Or let him hold her in his hands just so,
To get it right, and taste her as I wish to
Taste her, the streams of drool, the way eyes
Might lap like waves on the legs of a dock,
On the features of the face.
Though I have written better poems,
And poems which don’t mean a thing,
She has found a man who can drink with her
And not fall down, nor begin the catechisms
Which give her headaches:
Such as, you are lovely, oh so lovely,
Amen!
And, your legs go all the way up to heaven,
All the way up to Saint Michael and your
Satin purse,
Amen!
Things which only mean I would like to feel
Her up as I lay her down,
Things that any man would propose to her out
On the street where the university blurs,
And the highways flow like ghosts away and
Through the blood worked systems:
Soon and very soon, she will forget me
All and all,
And would not remember me at all if I
Hadn’t hooked her like a fish and brought her up
To my eye and told her my name,
But she struggled and got free and swam again
Back to his mighty lips,
But sometimes I think I see her furtive shadow following
Me in my sleep as I row the lonely doldrums
Depressed in the shadows,
But there are many fish in the sea,
But not a one with a vase and legs like hers.