New Girl Smell Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Houses like limpid shells,
So limpid, smell and taste like their
Previous masters,
Like girls so god-d-mned old;
They no longer smell of the sea
Before it might have been the sea, but of
The wash basins and jet fuel;
They don’t smell like swing sets anymore,
But their daughters are still arcing in
Sunlight:
Their daughters are real play- Just these
Things: believe me, you don’t understand,
Not even if you think you got it on
The tip of your tongue:
Pretty little girls sandcastles, spider-flume,
Arcing in the breaks of God,
But if you lay a hand on them, corrupted:
He will leave them,
This jealously abstaining bachelor:
He will just get on his bike and ride away into
A greener neighborhood;
And all the little girls you’ve seen will settle down
From play.
They will either graduate high school, or
They will not: making love in newer beds further up,
Or their own,
But they will live in their new masters’ homes,
Like dogs’ houses, enchained, washing dishes,
Pulling out laundry like the guts of game,
No longer smelling like how you left them; but of
The dry-walled shells, shellacked,
Landscaped by palms, as with her shampooed pubis;
and though the house
Is beautiful, she goes all day weeping with it
On her back; shopping,
Drinking with her enslaved sororities as if drinking alone,
Never to smell like god, like nothing, ever.