Perfections Of Flames Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Downed in the pantheon like Christians making
Love to lions,
Something triumphant as it dies into a bigger universe,
The headlights of cars,
Mismanaged into the many shops of songless birds:
All of it equated by the strange ribbons
Garlanding her wrists in the bathtub:
The gifts of peasants- the atrocities of garish airplanes
Trying to circumnavigate the Christmas tree:
The misspellings of my soul
Who has to awaken again and get up to work tomorrow
In a world that doesn’t know how
To receive- a father flying up to his son who
Burns him like a forest fire of lighthouses-
The exfoliations of many legged angels upon the barks of
Cypress until we get down to here:
Until we get down to the bosom of nature, and sing to her
Throat like a hidden fountain we drink from:
With the foxes, and the silent turtles:
Debased in a soul of forest fires: this Alma from Mexico,
Trying to cross and re-cross the borders,
The fronteras teaming with the mismanaged jungles of
Serpents and fireworks- like chickens and dead
Bodies telling jokes across the railroad tracks,
Smiling at the flea markets of cerulean madness:
Just to sojourn into her castle perilous,
To sleep on her roof housing the brownness of her perfection,
Until she awakens again,
Forgetting us like a dream of a healed scar- and the sun
Rises, and leaps as if a lion in its perfections of flames.